In this episode of Groong: Spotlight on Silence, we speak with Rafael Ishkhanyan of the Armenian Center for Political Rights about Armenia’s sweeping new surveillance law. Passed quietly in March 2025, the law grants police 24/7 access to camera networks across public institutions and allows for real-time facial recognition, raising deep concerns about privacy, political targeting, and unchecked state power. We explore what the law says, what it leaves out, and why international silence—despite clear risks to civil liberties—has been so striking.
Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Hovik: Welcome to another Groong Podcast, Spotlight on Silence, episode, where we expose the autocracy unfolding in Armenia and the international silence that lets it happen. Around the world, privacy is being chipped away, bit by bit. But in Armenia, it isn’t being chipped, it’s being bulldozed. While other governments debate ethics and oversight, Armenia has quietly passed a law that gives police sweeping, continuous access to facial recognition systems across public life.
This isn’t just a policy shift, it’s structural transformation of the state. Joining us today is Rafael Ishkhanyan from the Armenian Center for Political Rights, the ACPR, a watchdog group sounding the alarm about this rising surveillance regime and a new law that was passed. And today we’re going to talk about their report, “Big Brother in Armenia”. which is on this new law. What the law says, how it will be used, and what it means for rights, dissent, and democracy in Armenia.
Asbed: Hovik, before we bring in our guest, just a quick reminder. If today’s episode about biometric surveillance, facial recognition, and vanishing privacy doesn’t freak you out enough to chip in, Well, maybe it’ll at least nudge you to act. You should act to support our podcasts at podcasts.groong.org slash donate. And you can click on Patreon and Buy Me a Coffee and either give once or better yet, become a sustaining member.
And if that is not something you can do right now, you can still act. Help us push back… against the algorithm, not the police. Like, comment, and share the show on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, X, wherever you can find us. Every action you take helps us keep the shining of the spotlight, and especially when everyone else seems to be looking away.
Okay, on with the show, Hovik.
Hovik: Rafael Ishkhanyan, welcome back to the podcast. Hello, Hovik. Hello, Asbed. Welcome, Rafael.
Rafael, so the government argues that this new surveillance law is to ensure public safety, but the police would get real-time access to public cameras and across all public institutions, it seems, with a few exceptions. The scope and implications of the new law, however, have raised concerns among rights groups such as yours. So can you tell us what is at stake and why this issue matters for our listeners and viewers?
Rafael: So basically, we’re talking about, I mean, if your listeners are familiar with, I think you covered in your previous podcasts, the infamous draft law that was introduced last year, which would force the private enterprises to install cameras and provide 24-7 feed to the police.
This is the new incarnation of the same draft law, with the only difference that for the moment, they are not putting that obligation on the private entities rather they’re focusing as actually the ministry said when they frozen the first one they’re focusing as a first phase on the state and municipal institutions Other than that, what actually triggered us to look deeper into what’s happening at the moment is that it doesn’t have anything in this text, let’s say, in a clear way that they’re going to use facial recognition, AI-enabled tools to make this system work. so basically now right now what we are dealing is the law authorizes the police to collect uh and actually it obliges the the state and municipal institutions starting from schools and with parking lots to provide with a video stream with all necessary tools to the police and they will use the surveillance to enable facial recognition algorithms to identify people as the author or co-author of the law said, for all kinds of offenses.
That means, as they put it, for also littering in the streets. So this is what we’re doing now. And yeah, it went under the radars for, I don’t know for what reason, but I have my guesses, but it was actually adopted in March this year. It was postponed to entry into force.
And again, as they said, because they have to come up with this bylaw and regulations which would make it possible. So this is, I mean, in brief, this is what we’re dealing with at the moment. And we published a report on that. We brought that to attention that it contradicts the international standards, the Armenian commitments, and it bears immense danger of abuse and discrimination.
Asbed: So the Pashinyan regime and the Civil Contract controlled parliament quietly passed this law, as you said, in March 2025. And they’re granting the Ministry of Internal Affairs, sweeping round-the-clock access to camera systems installed in public buildings at this point, including schools. hospitals, municipal institutions. Of course, they claim that this will prevent crime and improve enforcement. But critics are saying that this is the road to unchecked surveillance.
What exactly does the law allow and what questions does it leave unanswered, Rafael?
Rafael: So there are several. It’s a very… It’s a brief amendment. It basically talks about how the streams of the video stream should be and what tools together should be provided to the police.
And as to the powers of the police, the most important part is that the police now will have authority to prevent and reveal offenses that happen in the view with the help of identification. So it doesn’t say what kind, but we learned that from the author’s speech when they were pushing the law. And just, by the way, just a piece of information that the same MP, Hayk Sargsyan, is also the author of another infamous law this year on the paid exemption from the military, which was already put out on the agenda because of the criticism. They’re going to have this power by law, but it’s not about this legal amendment, this draft law.
They’re going to provide the details with probably some regulations, some orders from the Minister of Internal Affairs or maybe the government. And we don’t know yet what it would be in the actual, so how it would turn out to be. So the issues are actually, as we wrote in our report, there are at least three levels of that. One is Armenia lacks legal framework on AI… facial recognition, biometric recognition whatsoever on these aspects of these new technologies.
This is something that, of course, it’s emerging and other countries are keeping pace. Like EU was the, let’s say, first important entity in the world that brought it to a comprehensive regulation. And despite some criticism, however, it turned out to be something that you can actually understand what’s happening and how it’s going to happen. And the people would know what to anticipate if it comes to the use of facial recognition systems.
In Armenia, we don’t have that. We don’t have the human rights risk-based regulations of these systems, which are very intrusive by design. The next issue is the way the draft is amended. it clearly contradicts what the Armenian commitments are in the international standards of human rights. And while we’re talking about that, people should know that Armenian constitution itself, it provides a bridge to the international human rights standards.
There’s an article, 81, which states that all the basic rights should be interpreted, taking into account the way that the international human rights bodies do that, So by the constitution, Armenia already tied itself to the, let’s say, European or global human rights network. So in that regard, we already have a lot of contradictions of this law with the existing both ECHR rulings and international standards. And the third one is, of course, this is the discrimination potential. The facial recognition technologies are inherently, they have biases.
There were many publications on that, even though they’ve been, the new iterations may be better at recognizing people, but still there is a chance for that. And they’ve not been tested in all demographics, which is in Armenia, that may be another question. And the other discrimination risk is the, let’s say, voluntary discrimination, how this will be used and who will be chosen to punish because we don’t have the fits. We don’t see who’s been identified and for what kind of offense and who’s been charged and who’s been omitted.
Hovik: Rafael, maybe I’m misremembering, but is it really true that the author of the law said that this could even help prevent the horrendous crime of littering on the streets of Yerevan? Is this what it’s going to be used for?
Rafael: Absolutely. And not only that, he said that this is one of the goals of the law, that we want to have a clear city and clear country by using facial recognition on litterers. This was the expression that really got our attention. And I think it’s good that he told that, because otherwise maybe with limited resources, we chose carefully on our topic to focus.
And we did that because of that, because it’s a clear contradiction with whatever Armenia has committed.
Hovik: I read your report, and I remember that there is some kind of an international norm, and we’ll talk more about international norms, but there’s some kind of international norm that AI and these types of systems should be used only for serious crimes, and there’s, I think, a prescription of crimes that exceed three to four years in punishment.
But normally, a normal parliamentarian might at least try to bring up an excuse like, hey, this will prevent… uh abuse of children or you know this this will prevent murders in the streets but it seems like uh you know Armenian MPs don’t even need to uh work that hard to to uh justify this but um Let me actually talk a little bit more about the original 2024 draft, which we did cover in episode 344 with security expert Ruben Muradyan and also security and privacy advocate Artur Papyan. That version of the law, mandated even private businesses to install cameras and give access to those feeds to the police real-time, 24 by 7.
So this final version of the law passed by parliament limits access to only state and municipal institutions, with a few exceptions, as we said. But nevertheless, it appears to cover most of public life. For instance, I’m concerned about when you’re on a bus, when you’re crossing the street and things like that, like the police cameras, the street traffic cameras and so forth. Is this revision meaningful, the removal of that private business mandate, or does it still, or in your opinion, do you think that the law still enables pervasive control?
Rafael: It does. I don’t see this as a positive change only because they changed the subjects of the law. First, as I mentioned, the ministry, when they froze the last iteration, they said we chose the step-by-step project. So they already told us this is first phase.
So they told that they’re going to put the burden on the private enterprises as, let’s say, as would be that the precautions are only economic, but they’re not. The second one is that everything that would happen, whatever, let’s say, interest, the state-controlled consolidation of autocracy whatsoever, this happens in areas that would happen in areas which are covered by this law. So for perspective, They include every state and municipal owned or controlled body or entity, which is huge.
In Armenian context, that would be from the kindergartens to any type of SNCO, and they have separate wording for the parking lots, which are operated by a private company, but they are under supervision of the ministry. So all these areas, you can hardly find any streets, let’s say in Yerevan, where you can walk several thousands of meters not to get in the proximity of any building that belongs to the state or the community. This is one thing.
The second, with this layout, they already cover nearly every, all and each area which in the past several years, any kind of protest has been held. that doesn’t only cover the large movements by the opposition, but let’s say some people, I don’t know, having a protest for the economic reasons or want to raise all the salaries, they go to this and that ministry, they go to the body which is accountable to the ministry, they go to the governmental building, or they go to the, let’s say, the Freedom Square, which has been traditionally a place to protest or to hold assemblies.
So it turns out that the Freedom Square is next to the SNCO, which already has three huge Chinese-made cameras, which when we checked, they are capable of identifying 30 people at once in long distances. So basically, they covered every area where any kind of gathering of people would happen.
Hovik: You mentioned Chinese-made cameras, and this made me think, does the law even or do Armenian regulations specify what the standards, the security standards for technologies that will be used for this type of data collection, for processing, for storage? Any insight you can provide us on that?
Rafael: I’m not very familiar with technical specifications, but as Ruben Muradyan and Artur Papyan last year, they mentioned all the infrastructure risks that such system would bring inevitably with all the leaks that happened, with all the capability Armenia has or, let’s say, doesn’t have. Of course, there will be issues. Basically, they are buying off-the-shelf equipment. And we may even anticipate that the system itself, the facial recognition system, would be also the off-the-shelf, so foreign-made system.
Because countries like Armenia, they don’t possess the capabilities to produce their own surveillance infrastructure. This may be, let’s say China, Russia, US or UK, maybe these type of countries with their economic advantage, they’re capable of doing that and they are doing that. But in the rest of the world, you have what’s available. And again, in this way, the Chinese equipment is very competitive and it’s very appealing.
And it’s been used in, I think, in dozens, maybe hundreds of countries around the world. So I think it would be expectable that they’re going to use these kind of cameras. They’re very capable. They are being updated very, I don’t know, frequently.
And when it comes to the software, so again, we don’t have, and I don’t think we’ll have any open source of kind of software that we use. But once I came across a promotional video by the police when they were showcasing the new equipment of the same SNCO, if I’m not mistaken, before this amendment. And they were using the Canadian-made, let’s call it, Avigilon or something similar, these systems. And there were the logotypes all over the screens when they showed their employees in the… in the area of the SNCO they’re working there.
So this system is also very well capable of facial recognition with databases that are uploaded there. And, I mean, it already has database. And this is just a matter of technical, some very minor skills, maybe, that for the system to be ongoing
Asbed: Rafael, as you’re discussing, Armenia has a lack of legislation that’s regulating artificial intelligence or biometric technologies. And these key details are being left to sub-legal regulations. This is basically what IT people would call policies and practices within the departments. So there’s no independent oversight, no transparency about how this data is going to be used and no clear safeguards against abuse.
Can you talk a little bit about the legal and institutional gaps that exist and why they matter?
Rafael: Yeah, we have a law that the law on personal information, the safeguard of personal information, which is basically is drafted after the European GDPR. But again, I mean, we lack the capabilities. Let’s put a perspective that a huge tech company violates privacy rights of people in EU. So these countries, these markets for them are very important. and they can impose very high sanctions.
And let’s say the same has happened with the UK and Apple, which we learned several months ago, that UK demanded them to provide backdoors for the encrypted content. And the Apple actually had to do something with that because they didn’t want to use, to lose the UK market. So they just tripped the UK users of this advanced end-to-end encryption for the cloud services. They compromise sometimes.
Or another place where there’s a violation, they may be fined in a huge amount of money that these big tech corporations, because, again, these markets are very important for them. They would rather pay several hundred millions. But still, this is a huge sum. In Armenia, the law does not put the sanctions based on the turnover.
It’s a miserable amount of money if we’re talking about a big tech company violating our privacy rights. So there’s absolutely nothing to them if it happens. So this is one thing. Second, again, when we’re talking about the personal data, I think there’s this, there’s been talked too much, but in many countries, including Armenia, maybe it’s a post-Soviet thing, maybe it’s a cultural thing, but the privacy is not being perceived by the general public as important as other human rights.
Asbed: Is this a matter of education about privacy in the country?
Rafael: We can put it as an issue of education in general terms. Maybe it’s a cultural education that has never been, let’s say, evaluated so much Or maybe there are no specialized actors on that. Like in many countries, again, in the UK we’re talking about, there are several watchdogs and society-specified organizations, specialized organizations on these issues, like the Big Brother Watch, the Privacy International, and the others. And I think they’ve been very influential on people trying to treat the privacy as something important.
And when we’re talking about what this law authorizes, the facial recognition, the biometric surveillance, by the way, it’s not only the face. There may be gait recognition, which is something harder. But it’s also now it’s possible. And some also do that.
The personal data we have, it can be changed. I can change my name. Of course, it will take time. It’s not a very easy thing to do.
But it’s doable. And I can change my passport. I can change my phone number. But changing the appearance, my face appearance, my facial expressions, It doesn’t change throughout the life.
Asbed: Not really possible.
Rafael: Yeah, maybe very costly and painful surgery, but I don’t think that people do that just for the privacy concerns. So when you have your biometric data exposed, that’s the end. You already lost that. You cannot change it.
So whoever has it, they can use it. They can sell it to someone, and then the others may use it or else. or malicious, I don’t know, intents. So this is one thing.
Asbed: So if the cat leaves the bag, who do you hold responsible for it? Can you sue the Ministry of Internal Affairs? Can you sue the infrastructure companies that are dealing with your data? How do you take care of this?
Rafael: Right. You can do that.
I think one thing is if this law passes, and I mean, it passed already, but if it enters into force and has been used, uh well debbie probably and I think our organization will also be involved in that will you can you can go to the administrative court you can try to bring a lawsuit against the police that they use their personal data unlawfully and again I mean Armenian legal framework is not only the domestic law it’s the international standards we have and ECHR has a very clear standard for that already after Glukhin case which is yeah if they use it against me for some very minor infraction I totally can go to European Court of Human Rights and have my decision against the law.
It will take years. I mean, if I have it six years from the moment, that’s not a very useful strategy, I think. So what’s important is we have to try to, we have to do it before it becomes a problem.
Hovik: As I said, bureaucrats and lawmakers always use various excuses to introduce overstepping legislation such as surveillance laws and so forth. They say it helps prevent crime, maybe even serious crime. But then it expands very quickly into other purposes. We have seen in the past that state camera footage has been leaked for political purposes before.
I mean, it’s very ubiquitous. For instance, I believe that during the protests, if I recall correctly, during the protests last year, one of the opposition members went on an overseas trip. And they presented videos from the airport of that opposition member leaving and said, see, you guys are protesting and your leader is going on vacation. And critics warned that this new law could also be used to monitor opposition figures. track protesters, and even selectively enforce minor violations.
So, you know, if you’re littering, then, you know, and if you’re in the opposition, they will catch you. But if you’re littering and you’re a government, they won’t care. So how real is the risk of this law being used as a political tool? Can you think of other examples of such selective enforcement of laws?
Rafael: I think it’s very real, and I personally think this is the main reason why this law has been enacted. So, yeah, the leaks happened a lot, and they all had one purpose, to serve the interest of the ruling party. So that’s it. I mean, we had leaks from the airport, as you mentioned in the case, leaks from the parliament building with the internal cameras.
The thing is that what provides this tool to them, this would actually just ease up whatever they have been already doing in an order of magnitude, that’s my understanding. In more details, we remember, this is actually just one year ago, at the same moment, last year to this day, there was this protest in front of the parliament building in Baghramyan, when the police used the stun grenades, and hundreds of people were injured, and we had footage of how the chief of police was personally ordering to throw the grenade in the area where there were absolutely no violent people there. And there were just protesters crammed up.
And it was just blatant violation of any type of rule you can imagine while managing with protests. So and actually, I just learned that he after dismissal, he left the country. But I don’t know that. So he probably would never be even be held accountable. the impunity and this situation of impunity and keeping in mind also their exotic punishments that they were being threatened, the protesters being sent to the, identified and sent to the military service part of these training camps and everything.
So this facial recognition system will ease up all these efforts by an order of magnitude. So you probably, I mean, this happened, and people know from the news, it happened in many countries. It happened from Hong Kong, it happened to environmental protests in the UK, it happened to Russia, it happened in the UK during BLM protests and many other places. So this is not anything new.
And after the pandemic, this technology has matured so much that even countries like Armenia can actually use them and incorporate in their own systems. So what we’re going to see, I think this is what the exact reason why it has been amended, the law has been amended, and it probably be used against, not only to incriminate the protestors, which also may be the case, there are several offenses in the administrative code, which deal with the violation of several regulations of protest, let’s say, I don’t know, not dismissing after six hours if it’s a spontaneous assembly. which is a minor offense.
It may be fined, but it was not used whatsoever. But now this can be used as an excuse because it is technically an offense to turn on the facial recognition and to identify everyone standing in front of the camera. And what I see now is that we are entering the pre-election race. And I think it already started as the ruling party, the prime minister, doing this learning is trendy campaign, which is basically a part of the pre-election campaign before the law allows it.
The opposition is doing something there. All these attacks to the church and everything. This is, I regard in the logic, of preparing to the elections. So let’s imagine from this moment on, whoever takes on the streets tries to make a political name for themselves or those actors who are already in the area.
So with the systems, it is a matter of technical skill to identify everyone who is protesting, how long they are protesting, which protest they came, with whom they stood, who are the recurring people there, who is the core proponents of this or that political figure. And just imagine with all this information, what can be assumed, what can be constructed on that, and how many political gains you will achieve.
Because in my understanding, the coming elections will be more based on, you know, or more targeted decisions gaining of new voters yeah I mean in 2002 we had a bulldozer everyone who was former they are bastards then we had if it’s not me there would be a war now they have to come up with different and more tailored and well you know uh surgically uh more pinpoint ideas and even taking Like 0-10% from one group and directly to yours, we’re going to make difference. We saw municipal elections losing somewhere by thin margin.
So this is one of the tools that may allow to analyze the political street and make many far-reaching arrangements on that.
Hovik: Yeah. In fact, I have to say that as someone who works in this field in terms of privacy and security, one thing I want to highlight is that many people just seem to think, oh, it’s just a camera. It’s going to record you when you pass by. But the control and the ability to track you is much more pervasive because the Armenian police already has other tools to track your location.
So for instance, your cell phone keeps beaming your location coordinates to cell phone towers continuously and they have access to that information. And as we know, nobody cares and they probably could have pervasive access to that information too. So let’s say they want to track who activist Rafael Ishkhanyan is meeting every day. And even if they don’t know who the other person is in their facial recognition cameras, just simply by knowing that you are at that location, they can turn on the cameras and see you walking with a different individual and try to then identify the other individual that way.
So it’s a very big invasive investigative tool that were essentially the Armenian government has decided to give itself and you know I was thinking another use case where let’s say you’re a journalist and you you have to interview confidential sources you have to keep your sources confidential this law would make that very hard for journalists to maintain confidentiality of their sources But yeah, I don’t know. That’s my commentary on this. Asbed, anything you want to add? No, I hardly consider that commentary, Hovik.
Asbed: I think that’s just the truth. That’s just the data. If you know your IT, you know that these things can be correlated and they are very invasive.
Hovik: So even when surveillance is legal, its presence can affect how people behave. It’s known as the chilling effect, and it has been documented in various areas. Knowing that they’re being watched may cause individuals to avoid protests, limit what they say in public, or even withdraw from civil life altogether. In Armenia, many public spaces now fall under camera coverage, including key protest sites and transportation hubs.
So what impact might this have on free expression and public participation, in your opinion?
Rafael: I mean, you already told all the methods how it works. Yeah, the chilling effect is not just a fancy word. And it has at least twofold implications. One, people censor what they do.
They say they feel something. They want to protest. They want to join it because, you know, the fear being identified and then later persecuted by that. The second is, even if they do, they would limit their behavior, their sense of their behavior.
So the protest would be, as it were, would be if there was not the system being turned on then, and people wouldn’t know that. Many rights groups and many advocates in this area, they call this the panopticon effect. It derives from this old concept of a very effective prison, when you have a prison watch in the middle of the circular prison, which with a spotlight they would look and can see each and every cell that there are people held there. But they can’t look all of them at the same time.
So the people, the chilling effect is that the inmates, they don’t know who is being monitored at the moment, so they would accordingly correlate their behavior as if they were being watched all the time. So with this type of technologies, this is… more than just the panopticon, because they can, if they automate that, they can actually follow everyone all the time if they need to, or they can put specific targets at the cost of surveillance. And it’s not only the public areas, and if we believe to the ministry, if it’s only the first phase, and they will also be then spread to the privates, now it also covers the public transportation.
They already have cameras there. They already have the facial recognition capable payment terminals there. So again, I mean, all the commute and everything can be monitored. And so you said how much leverage it would give to the government.
Asbed: Rafael, let’s talk a little bit about the international response because there’s been really not a lot of it. Some international organizations like the CSO meter have issued warnings about Armenia’s new surveillance law, but political reactions have been Pretty limited, I would say. Despite the law’s broad scope and lack of safeguards, Western governments and donors have not publicly challenged it. This stands in contrast with how similar developments have been handled in other countries.
So the same organization, the CSO Meter, that issued a warning about the law, has in the past given Armenia a score of good. On a scale of one to seven, they’ve labeled it a 5.8. The same thing in Georgia has been a 4.0. And on freedom of assembly, Armenia is a 5.7, while Georgia is a 3.1.
In general, this seems extremely political because in Armenia, the ruling party is the darling of the West, while in Georgia, it’s almost exactly the opposite. Can you talk a little bit about this international response, why it is so muted, and what the silence suggests?
Rafael: I think that there are several aspects to that. First of all, absolutely, there is the political expediency part there, and this is huge. We should also remember that many of the Western countries, they also are very eager to practice, and some do practice, this pervasive technology as a way of control. So that’s one thing.
But then the other, again, if you’re in a political vector, the vector that the country follows coincides with your interests, you’re going to criticize them too much. Why Georgia has been criticized a lot is because of their, let’s say, political shift that happened last year or like two years ago, it started to happen with the war in Ukraine. And the discourse that these organizations and the meters are giving, they’re not basically math. They can be stripped in several points because of, let’s say, the foreign agent law or, I don’t know, some new developments in the protests.
Basically, the Georgian government also uses facial recognition, has been on the spotlight recently when the protesters are blocking Rustaveli Avenue. And they are using this to do this sort of SLAPP cases, fining them. The fines are quite high at the moment there. Yeah, so the one thing, there’s this political thing.
So, yeah, Armenia is perceived to be more aligned with their political ideals. So they have some grace, let’s say, areas that they can do something more than the others.
Asbed: Some leniency, you mean?
Rafael: Yeah, some leniency, yes, for sure. The other thing is, in many countries, first, there were the civil society who voiced the issues. In Serbia, when they used the facial recognition before doing any maintenance in the law, there were the rights groups that actually identified the problem, and they raised the awareness, they talked about that, and they talked about that, so there was some response following it. I mean, I’m trying to Nearly every day I’m writing some keywords to see what kind of international reactions were to this issue.
And sometimes I don’t find any. I mean, the CSO Meter response was the first one I got. Today, Transparency International also wrote on the Facebook and they refer to the CSO Meter publication because they are the partner in Armenia. And that’s basically it.
But then there is a different issue. Many of the organizations which are specializing in legal review, like the OSCE ODIHR or the Venice Commission or some other instruments, By their own regulations, they cannot provide these reviews just by themselves. They should have an application. So in Georgia, the ombudsperson has been of, let’s say, different political ideology, now sort of contradicting what the current government has.
And they have been submitting the draft laws to the OSCE ODIHR, and they’ve been able to write their opinions on that, which would then be considered as an international response. So in Armenia, we have to find a way to do that, which is very difficult, because only the state bodies are able to do that. Only the parliament as a whole can apply to the Venice Commission, not the opposition parties. Yeah.
Hovik: And everyone is loyal to Pashinyan, like all the branches of the government, even the oversight branches are completely loyal to Pashinyan. Basically, yes.
Rafael: When we published this, we sent the report also to the Human Rights Defenders Office. We’re thinking that this is not something that she’s going to bash this law all by herself, but with the suggestion to… submitted to the OSCE ODIHR for legal review, they can do that. I mean, she can do that. The ombudsperson’s office can do that.
And I mean, we don’t know the exact answer. They did or not. But let’s see. I mean, did she respond?
She responded that they received the letter. I see. Yeah. So let’s see.
I mean, this is one of the, I think this law goes too much and too far. Even that the political expediency will be maybe, will not be enough to cover it if it’s well addressed. The same happened with this grave insults law, if you remember. It was a criminal offense for insulting people and was mostly used as a weapon against government critics. then they decriminalized that law because mostly from the European part, there were many criticisms towards it.
Then they just changed their practice. Now they’re using the hooliganism as a pretext for the same kind of lawsuits. But sometimes when it gets too far, and if the suicide works on that, I mean, despite the political alignment there may be some response, probably. I think we can still reach that because otherwise there’s just no way to influence the government to step down.
Hovik: Look, so we already said this, Armenia’s track record on data security is poor. During the 2020 war, we talked about this in episode 344, camera systems were compromised. There has been absolutely no audit of that event or any major breach. I can’t recall if there was any public reckoning of what happened.
There was even a report in 2024 that there was going to be this deal with AWS on cloud storage and cloud computing, which raised data sovereignty concerns and no transparency was provided.
We know that the company that is operating these terminals for public transportation, it’s allegedly linked to a foreign national and it’s unclear if the data that is being about Armenian persons is being shipped overseas. no ai or biometric laws exist as you have said and there seems to be no independent body that oversees surveillance use or data access so how has Armenia handled security and privacy incidents in the past am I mistaken when I when I said that there is uh the track record is very poor and what does the track record tell us about what to expect from this law now
Rafael: Yeah. Just recalling the score that Armenia was given with privacy being quite high, I think maybe some part of it is due to the textual, let’s say, aspect of the law, which is, as I said, it’s drafted after GDPR, which is at the moment, this is the gold standard in the world. Other than that, the The breaches that happened, the leaks during the war, as you mentioned, and actually some happened in a very, you know, very blatant way. One of these forwarding companies, they accidentally or not accidentally, I know because maybe not good due diligence, they caused a huge leak of personal data.
So, yeah, the… Again, one thing is they’re not very well-established mechanisms, and Armenia is having, let’s say, poor economy. They can’t really, how to put it, they can’t really address them in the way as, let’s say, the US or other countries are doing. But the data breaches happen there also.
But they still, at least they manage to patch the holes in the end, and the perpetrators will try to choose a different way. I think this idea was that trying to outsource the data is something that the current government, and maybe not only them, are very fond of. Last year, I think, in one of the discussions of the new platform for the state procurements, which is being… Still, I think, I don’t know if it’s done or not.
The deputy minister was suggesting maybe they would host them on the Microsoft Azure servers. Because, I don’t know, because it’s fancy or because it’s cheap or because it’s… I don’t really know the rationale behind that. It’s generally cost.
Asbed: Yeah. Which company gives you a bigger, a better deal, basically, or subsidizes your effort just to gain your customership?
Rafael: Yeah. But as Ruben in your other podcast, he mentioned, this doesn’t solve the issues. You have to have that capabilities because they don’t provide you the security by design. So you still have to have the capability to build this security infrastructure around it.
I don’t think… Again, I’m not expert in this area, but I don’t see anything going in that direction. If last year the procurement platform is being discussed, we put in a Microsoft Azure, so that means the same issues are still now there, they’re present. I think that with this system, probably they will probably go with whatever works best and whatever will work fastest, because To me, this will be very useful in this pre-electoral period.
So maybe it’s easier to put something together in Armenia, or maybe it would be technically feasible to put it there. I don’t think they will pay so much attention on that, and that goes to paying attention to security. Again, I think Ruben can give more insights. When I speak to him, again, I don’t understand most of the terms that he’s telling.
But basically, this is a very hard thing to set up a proper security of this kind of system because any adversary would try to reach into it because it would have many valuable things there. The biometric data is valuable. Let’s say you identify during the wartime the soldiers. That’s something that Ukraine now uses.
They use the Clearview AI, which scraps, or it scrapped at least for some time ago, images from the internet, and they would identify Russian soldiers with the help of this AI. So imagine having all this biometric data without scraping it.
Hovik: Well, I mean, I don’t have to imagine it. As someone who practices in that field, I can see the results every day, and I can assure you and our listeners that this is a serious concern. And if multinational corporations are being fined for constantly violating privacy standards, a small country like Armenia without any oversight, and with a government that doesn’t seem to have the political will to care about privacy, I can assure you that this is a stuff of nightmares, at least for me it is.
So if you’re an MP and you’re bringing up littering as a reason for tracking people with cameras, that just affects, that just talks about not just the level of intellect of the MP, first of all, but also that they don’t even… care about any public repercussions that this could have. And we didn’t talk that much about this, but why has there been such a muted response from the Armenian public? Do you think this is like, I mean, Armenians are still like in post-war apathy? And that was my next question also.
That’s really important.
Asbed: I mean, we blame the government for this and that and everything, but ultimately the Armenian people need to stand up and say, this cannot happen or protect themselves a little bit.
Rafael: Again, I think the To me, one of the issues we discussed earlier is the perception of the right to privacy is not something that important. I think the importance of this right is just not present here at the moment. It’s not mature yet. It’s very wrong.
For instance, some month ago, I think, it was reported that Prime Minister’s former advisory, Nairi Sargsyan, he, during one of his statements, said that during the pandemic, he had on his hand the list with the database of the Armenian taxpayers. And when the journalist went after it, trying to ask the State Revenue Committee and the others, they just absolutely didn’t have any response how it happened, why it happened. So this is one thing. I mean, by accident, is the brother of the MP.
Hovik: Right, right.
Rafael: So, yeah. And, I mean, it didn’t bother anyone because when I tried to search for what was the follow-up story of this, I only find the original several articles which were in Sputnik News at the moment. And no one followed it, which people would say that it would probably interest more because it has to do something with the businesses with it. the private enterprises. So they probably should be more into having some checks and balances on whoever gets their information.
So it turns out the prime minister’s advisory has them. So we were discussing the security, I think, on par, at least the same issue is with the potential abuse. To me, the abuse is even more pressing issue at the moment because we’ve seen the abuse many times. We never see any, we’ve seen impunity after this abuse.
So probably this one is going to be abused again. They’re going to be used to the political expediency and so forth. But that’s one thing. The other thing I think is that somehow I’m not following how the, let’s say the other mainstream media is promoting this idea.
Maybe they’re not so much, but recently there was the promotional video from the police that will use drones to navigate the traffic and, of course, count the number of the protesters for their own safety, of course. And this is with the drones, the facial recognition, these fancy technologies that, oh, if you use that, that means we are stepping from the third world country, now we’re going straight to the technologically advanced economy or whatever. So for some people, this is something cool. For many others, there may be, again, some cultural aspect to it that maybe it’s for good.
Maybe if they can identify offenders, so I’m okay with being exposed to the cameras all the time. I don’t do anything bad. I don’t have anything to hide. I mean, this very standard, typical answer, I think it may be very prevalent.
Or maybe a combination of all of those things and some more.
Asbed: I guess this is part of the online literacy that is a problem in Armenia because it’s a generation that’s been coming up with Facebook as if Facebook is their internet. The entire government seems to run on Facebook. In fact, it’s almost a concern to me that Facebook could shut down the Armenian government anytime it wanted because of community rules, if they feel like it.
Hovik: Well, so far they’re shutting us down sometimes, not the government. Yeah, that’s right.
Rafael: Yeah, but you’re right. This is, again, outsourcing of the power. I mean, this also shows that the government really doesn’t so much care about the security of data rather than its effectiveness. So if Facebook is effective, let’s build all the infrastructure there, all the supporter base there.
So yeah, if someday Facebook doesn’t exist, they will be left with very few things. Yeah. Yeah.
Asbed: So this law is set to go into effect on August 9, 2025. And rights group have called for the law to be repealed or submitted for international review just to get a feedback about this. But there’s been no sign of delay from the authorities. As the clock ticks down, the question is whether there’s still room for public pressure, legal challenge, or outside scrutiny to change the course of this.
Can anything still be done to halt or delay the implementation? And another question is, should it be halted or delayed or should it be modified further for the better? What’s the right thing to do?
Rafael: that’s great questions so when we were writing the report we’re discussing about should we touch also on the aspect of that Armenia lacks cybersecurity infrastructure for having a system like that at the moment and we both decided not to go into this for one reason we don’t want to get into the dialogue that it should be done in a different way or we say it should not be done so we talked about international standards and uh again this is something that the facial recognition is not going anywhere. It’s going to become easier and even better working and everyone going to employ it. I mean, there’s no way around it.
It will be employed some moment in the East and it will become omnipresent to me. I mean, it’s a pessimistic point of view, but that’s what I think. What we can do is at least we can put checks at least legally. Let’s say they would still use it unofficially, but they can use it against me in the court.
So at least that’s something against the total surveillance. So this is something that should be working. So what we say, we say this law should be repealed. We’re not saying how you should write down the way how you have to run facial recognition on people.
Ideally, you should not. This is not a technology without that. We lived for millennia, let’s say. And there are many other more targeted technologies that can help you to identify grave criminals or others.
The rights group, when the EU actually adopted the AI Act, they were advocating for a total ban of biometric surveillance. They didn’t achieve that, and basically the EU, they had some thin margins, very specialized cases that can be used, but it still can be used. If it can be used, it can be abused. So that was when you were told about the standards, three, four years.
This is the EU standard. In EU, you cannot use facial recognition for offenses which are punished by something less than three, four years, which is a grave offense by itself. You can’t use it for littering if it’s not, let’s say, industrial littering from a factory, which is not something that facial recognition is applicable. or for jaywalking, or either violating some procedural norms of a peaceful assembly, if the assembly is still peaceful. So you can’t use this system there.
But in another region, the Council of Europe region, there’s the European Court of Human Rights, and they have their own standards, which are more or less in line with that. So for minor offenses, this should not be used. And this is going to stay. I mean, this standard is going to stay here.
But again, The standard has been set. So it’s not outlawed. You can use facial recognition in this and that area. So if you can use it, absolutely you can abuse it.
And they’re going to abuse it absolutely all the time. Still, we can have just one barricade that this use will not be considered legal, and this will not, let’s say the repressiveness, the apparatus will lose one limb that is using this material officially against someone in the court. This is pessimistic, I think, but I mean, to be more realistic, this is something that we are trying to achieve.
Hovik: All right, we’ll wrap it up here. Rafael, thank you for joining us. We appreciate your insights and hope to continue this conversation and other conversations like this in the future. Thank you, Rafael.
Thank you. Thank you very much.
Asbed: Well, okay, that’s our show today. This episode of Spotlight on Silence was recorded on June 12, 2025. We’ve been talking with Rafael Ishkhanyan, who is a lawyer specializing in human rights, particularly freedom of assembly and expression. He coordinates the monitoring of peaceful assemblies at the Helsinki Committee of Armenia, and he’s a member of ODIHR, the panel of experts on freedom of assembly and association.
In 2023, together with colleagues, he co-founded the Armenian Center for Political Rights, which we mentioned earlier, the ACPR. This is a watchdog organization now focusing on detecting, responding to and preventing political persecution and safeguarding political rights.
Hovik: We hope you found today’s conversation thought-provoking. or at least unsettling in the right ways. And before you go, one final request. If you haven’t already, please hit that follow button on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. It’s a small step for you, but a big help for us as we try to cut through the noise on those platforms.
Asbed: Yeah. Please follow us. And like we said earlier, act. Subscribe to Groong as a one-time donation or a sustaining member or share, like, or comment on our shows.
That helps us a lot. I’m Asbed Bedrossian in Los Angeles. And I’m Hovik Manucharyan. Thanks for listening.