Readers' Forum

When parents have a child born with a disability, it is usually healthcare professionals who often apply social pressure on them to reject their baby. This White Paper argues in favor of targeted intervention, that is, retraining medical staff, among other things, about their responsibility to communicate with parents professionally and without bias.

Every child has the right to live with a family, whether it’s a biological, adoptive, foster or guardian family. However, every child also has the right to live a life of dignity and tranquility. Kushane Chobanyan looks at some of the successful and not-so-successful cases of foster families in Armenia.

Why do people volunteer, how is volunteer work regulated and what are the key issues the volunteering sector faces in the Republic of Armenia? This is a primer of EVN Report’s White Paper, “Volunteering in Armenia: Key Issues and Challenges.”

Protecting the most vulnerable in society is one of the most important roles of the state. There are people, however, like Mira Antonyan, the director of FAR’s Children Support Center Foundation, who for many years, along with others, shouldered that burden.

Transitional Justice is a special form of justice, applied temporarily in countries where there have been massive abuses of human rights, usurption of power or genocide. It can also applied in countries like Armenia, where important political and social transition has taken place, where at the same time, there needs to be a break with the past.

Nine centuries ago, Armenian scholar Mkhitar Gosh enshrined the rights of children in the Armenian national discourse. Protecting the rights of children, ensuring their care, education and health is the responsibility of the family and the state. Today, as in the past, it is also the love of others that can make all the difference.

Every child has the right to live in a family. Today, more than half of all children in orphanages have disabilities. This a primer of EVN Report’s White Paper about specialized foster care for children with disabilities .

EVN Report discusses the policy of deinstitutionalizing orphanages and providing care for children with disabilities within the context of their right to family life with Deputy Minister of Labor and Social Affairs Zhanna Andreasyan.

No child should be abandoned and no child should live in an institution. This is a story of a group of mothers whose concern, love and compassion is changing the lives of children with disabilities and their families.

A child’s right to family life is enshrined in Armenian and international legal documents and considered a priority in Armenia’s 2017-2021 Strategic Plan on the Protection of the Rights of the Child. Here is EVN Report's White Paper about specialized foster care for children with disabilities.