The RA NA delegation takes part in the second part ordinary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe going on in Strasbourg led by the Vice President of the National Assembly, the Head of the RA NA delegation to PACE Ruben Rubinyan.
During the session the member of the NA delegation Sona Ghazaryan delivered a report. In her speech, handed over by the Press office of Armenia’s Parliament, the Deputy said:
“Violence, intimidation, and hate speech directed at politicians are not simply personal attacks. They are attacks on representative institutions, on political pluralism, and on the free exchange of ideas that sustains democratic life. When elected representatives are threatened into silence, it is not only a politician who loses his/her voice. Citizens lose their voice as well.
In Armenia, politics was long heavily demonised and rarely seen as a space for young women. The environment did not encourage their participation, nor did it suggest that public life was open to a new generation of female voices.
It was only after the Velvet Revolution that more young women began to enter politics, bringing with them the renewal and energy that democratic institutions need. Yet that progress came with resistance. I personally faced significant hate speech because of both my age and my gender. Much of it was intended not only to attack an individual, but to send a wider message: that politics is not a place for young women.
I have now served as a Member of Parliament for eight years, and I have learned that one of the only effective ways to confront such hostility is to speak openly about it.
Silence protects the problem; honesty begins to dismantle it. By addressing these experiences publicly, we have helped to clear a path for new women parliamentarians who, at least in my view, have been targeted less for being young or for being women.
We should also recognise the strategy behind such abuse: to make politics appear hostile, exhausting, and undesirable for younger generations,” the MP noted.
