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The bill on launching EU integration process is a civic initiative and doesn’t envisage any timeframes or mechanisms, Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan has said.
Mirzoyan, speaking at a joint press conference with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow, was asked on potential timeframes of Armenia hoping to join the EU and how it plans to combine it with its current membership to the Eurasian Economic Union.
“The bill is a public document and it doesn’t contain any timeframes or specific mechanisms. I would like to remind you that this is a civic initiative. The organizations collected the required fifty thousand signatures, as required by the Constitution, and now that initiative has automatically transformed into a bill and will be debated in parliament. The Cabinet has approved the bill, and I assume the parliament majority will vote in favor,” Mirzoyan said, adding that the bill doesn’t imply anything more.
Regarding the possible simultaneous membership to the EU and the EEU, Mirzoyan said that experts argue that there are contradictions in this matter.
“I am not the one to judge, if such an issue emerges then, probably, we must understand what to do,” FM Mirzoyan said.
On January 9, the Cabinet approved the bill seeking to launch the process of EU integration. The bill, which is set to be discussed in parliament, was initiated by several civic organizations through a petition which garnered enough votes to be considered as a bill.