Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview IV. Working Group on Democratic Governance of Multiethnic... Author(s) Gayane Buniatyan Yerevan State University Yerevan Armenia Title How does Armenia educate its public administrators in protecting and managing ethnic diversity? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract Since the independence in 1991 Armenia has adopted the policy of integration in the International and European structures and in the international community in general. The precondition for that is the compliance with the international standards in the sphere of protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms. Making the issue of further development of democracy and the protection of human rights as one of its internal and foreign policy priorities, Armenian authorities have made significant efforts for the formulation of legal and institutional protection of human rights. Representatives of over 20 nations live in the Republic of Armenia - Belorussians, Georgians, Germans, Greeks, Jews, Kurds, Poles, Russians, Syrians, Ukrainians, Yezides. According to the preliminary data of the 2001 national census ethnic minorities compose around 2.19 percent of the total population of the Republic of Armenia. Armenia is a member of different international organizations and has signed a number of conventions and charters which touch upon the issue of ethnic minorities rights and freedoms. “Within the framework of Memorandum of Understanding signed in 1998 between the OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights and the Government of the Republic of Armenia, in May of 2000 in Yerevan the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Armenia organized a round table on the problems of national minorities as well as religious organizations of Armenia. …As a result of discussions was decided to contemplate special courses on relevant themes in the program of educational institutions of the Republic of Armenia. For this purpose special educational collections are being prepared and shall be published soon.” This is a quotation from the First Report of the Republic of Armenia Pursuant to paragraph 1 of Article 25 of the Framework Convention for Protection of National Minorities in 2001. This make us start contemplating and further examining the implementation of the mentioned commitments. In the current paper we would like to research and find out how much and how well are the commitments and legal obligations of the RA are implemented. Namely, we will try to find out what kind of courses and materials are included in the higher educational institutions providing Public Administration degrees. Of great interest will be to examine the current draft law about Ethnic Minorities which will be soon presented to the National Assembly for approval. It will be specifically notable to examine the parts concerning the areas of interest of this paper, namely: whether the law touches upon the inclusion of the curricula of ethnic minorities in the educational programs of Public Administration schools. As has already been mentioned there is quite an extensive positive legislative field regarding the rights and freedoms of ethnic minorities. We will try to find out how much is the awareness of the public administrators is in the field, that is how much does the state educational system provide room and also standards for teaching democratic ethnic diversity management in Armenia.
