Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly-Vanadzor

On November 6, 2019, a group of servicemen applied to HCA Vanadzor in order to receive legal support. They informed the Organization that on November 2, 2017, RA MoD N. 21833 military unit was reformed into RA MoD 3rd army corpus N. 37082 material maintenance battalion.  Since then, servicemen have been partly paid for their work trip expenses.  

The situation worsened, since from April 2019 till November 2019 they did not get any reimbursement at all. According to the information given by the servicemen, they are monthly paid AMD 101.000-117.000, besides which they were also supposed to receive reimbursement for work trip expenses. Not receiving it, the servicemen were obliged to cover their work trip expenses in the frame of the mentioned sum of money. 

For example, one of them told that the RA MoD had not paid him AMD 55,000 and the same sum of money was not paid to another driver. The greatest sum of money not paid for the reimbursement of work trips amounted to AMD 292,000. According to the servicemen, the management explained this situation by the fact of delays in transfers of financial quarter. In general, RA MoD obligations regarding servicemen was between AMD 33,000 – AMD 292,000. 

HCA Vanadzor undertook the restoration of the servicemen’s violated rights and sent a note to the RA MoD Minister Davit Tonoyan. Besides, at the same time, the servicemen sent a note regarding the same issue to the RA Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

Invoking the RA MoD order N 915 dated August 20, 2013, which establishes the procedure of organizing and implementing servicemen’s work trips in the RA, Nagorno-Karabakh and foreign territories, HCA Vanadzor claimed that the Minister of Defense give an official clarification regarding the created situation and take the necessary measures to restore servicemen’s violated rights. 

In RA MoD’s response note addressed to HCA Vanadzor, Minister of the Defense Ministry assured that as instructed by him, the documents of the above-mentioned military unit were examined for the time period of November 2017-November 2019 in order to find out the conditions related to the issue. As a result, all the servicemen-drivers’ work trip expenses were reimbursed.