Raw & Unfiltered

There is no honor in silence. There is no honor when the most vulnerable are subjected to horrifying crimes. Human rights defenders and first responders deal with these cases on a daily basis. Human rights defender Zara Hovhannisyan shares some of her experiences with those whose destinies have been shattered.

Almost a third of families living in rural Armenia are female-headed households, a UN Report in 2017 found. These households are more likely to be in extreme poverty than male-headed households. This film by Tsovinar Hakobyan and Joe Nerssessian focuses on the lives of five women from Syunik.

A leading member of the Georgian Social-Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century, Eleonora Ter-Parsegova played an important role in the struggle leading up to Georgia’s independence in 1918 and later, after it was sovietized.

In the second of a two-part series on the need for a human rights-based approach to policymaking, human rights activist and researcher Anahit Simonyan talks to a number of ministers and a deputy minister about field specific issues such as poverty, discrimination, health protection and more.

Over 5500 senior citizens in Armenia who are not eligible to receive a pension, are on welfare. They receive about $50 US per month. Armenia’s minimum food basket, according to the Ministry of Health stands at about $72 US per month. In this photo story, EVN Report tries to understand how these pensioners survive.

In the public discourse, sex is often seen as being diametrically opposed to almost everything - religion, love, traditional values, even the motherland. With this in mind, many will be shocked to hear that sex does exist in Armenia, Sona Martirosyan writes.

Is it in the mutual interest of Armenia and the diaspora to build a stronger connection with one another? A recent study on Armenia-Diaspora relations sheds new light on perceptions, opportunities and possibilities, one of which might be the creation of a diaspora-portal as a web-based sorting database for establishing connections.

In 2018, the Armenian people were swept up in a nationwide movement that would come to be known as the Velvet Revolution. Photojournalist Eric Grigorian took thousands of photos, documenting and capturing images of ordinary people who came together to achieve the extraordinary. Through his own words, Grigorian tells the story of the revolution and the moments in-between.

Over a decade ago, Armenia’s government launched a pilot project called Deinstitutionalization of Orphanages. The initiative, which also sought the creation of a Foster Family program was not successful for many reasons, but mostly because it was never really child-centered. The Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs is set to change that.

What happens to those senior citizens in Armenia, who don’t have families who can or want to take care of them? There are only a handful of public and private old age homes, most suffering from lack of funding and poor services.