Civil Contract (Armenia)

The Civil Contract Party has no definite ideology. Its leader, Nikol Pashinyan, states: “There are no clear lines between political ideologies anymore … in the 21st century, those lines disappeared. It’s not acceptable for me to call our party ‘liberal,’ ‘centrist,’ or ‘social democrat,’ because the goals we have to achieve are beyond ‘-isms.’”[3]

July 3, 2014 press conference

Civil Contract first came into the public consciousness on January 23, 2013, when MP Nikol Pashinyan from the opposition bloc publicized a project to establish a new political process in the newspaper Haykakan Zhamanak (The Armenian Times).[11] For several months afterwards, the text of the contract was widely discussed in Armenian political forums. An updated version of the contract was published and Civil Contract, a new political union, was announced on July 24 of that year. The union announced that before its first conference, the text of the contract would be amended and clarified and a detailed road map created.

Civil Contract governing board in 2014

During fifth convention of the party in June 2019 acting Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructures Suren Papikyan was elected as Chairman of the 21 member strong governing board.[12]

Civil Contract's governing board was introduced at a December 9, 2013 Ani Plaza Hotel press conference. It was formed to organize the first party convention.

The governing board was:

• Arsen Kharatyan, specialist in Arabic studies
• Arayik Harutyunyan, specialist in Arabic studies with a PhD in history and a Yerevan State University lecturer
• Marine Manucharyan, theologian, NGO director
• Sasun Mikayelyan, commander of the Sasun detachment, member of Yerkrapah[13] and a former MP
• Lena Nazaryan, journalist
• Alen Simonyan, lawyer, editor-in-chief of the Ararat Media Group
• Nikol Pashinyan, former journalist, former MP, prime minister

The Civil Contract Return Fund was established to ensure that the party's funding complies with Armenian law and its activities are democratically organized. Funds donated to Civil Contract will be stored in the fund's account and vault. Accounting will be conducted under the supervision of the board of trustees, which is independent of the governing board and controls the fund's expenditures. According to the party's contract, "Citizens who have donated money or property to the Contract shall have the right to request information on spending, and their demands are to be satisfied within three days' time."

The Civil Contract board of trustees was announced on February 22, 2014. Haykak Arshamyan was elected chairman, and Hakob Simidyan was appointed director of the fund. Members are:

• Lara Aharonian, Women's Resource Center co-founder, director
• Haykak Arshamyan, PhD in history
• Levon Bagramyan, economist, political scientist, Washington, D.C.
• Arthur Ispiryan, musician
• Levon Hovsepyan, economist
• Ara Shirinyan, director
• Maro Matossian, Women's Support Center director
• Edgar Manukyan, PhD in economics, Toronto, Canada
• Sargis Kloyan, businessperson

July 3, 2014 press conference

The Civil Contract governing board published "Financing Politics and Civil Contract", an article touching on the issues of fiscal transparency and financing public and political life in Armenia, on April 26, 2014:

Financing politics is one of the essential entangled knots of the history of the Third Republic. How is the public-political activity financed in Armenia? It's a question the proper answer of which is not known. One can guess, put forward hypotheses, but the society does not have a reliable and verifiable answer to the question ... The most popular answer is that "we are funded by thousands of our supporters". This is an answer, which generates new questions: whom and how do the supporters give the money? Who takes it and under what conditions? How do others learn whether their retainer has donated that much, more or less money ... ? From the very first stage of the debates over establishing “civil contract” public–political union the issues about funding the activities of the contract have been the subject of heated debate. How is the contract going to be financed? Who will be financing it? The answers to these questions were principal for us. And if we have serious ambition to achieve fundamental changes in public–political relations, we need to try to work ourselves out of the Armenian traditional funding mechanisms of political activity. We have formulated the problem the following way: if we need 1000 AMD, we need to find not a single person that will give us that money, but we need to find 1000 people each of whom will donate 1 AMD.

On March 31, 2018, Civil Contract leader Nikol Pashinyan and his supporters began a 200-kilometre (120 mi) march from Gyumri (Armenia's second-largest city) to the capital, Yerevan, to dissuade Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan from retaining power beyond his legal term limit.[14] On April 17, Nikol Pashinyan announced the start of a national, nonviolent "velvet revolution" to thousands of supporters gathered near the National Assembly.[15] On April 22, several hours after a brief meeting with Sargsyan, Pashinyan was arrested with about 250 other protesters.[16] After mass strikes by organized labor and streets blockaded by over 300,000 protesters (including soldiers and Civil Contract members), Sargsyan resigned on April 23.[17] He said then, "Nikol Pashinyan was right. I was wrong. The movement of the street is against my office. I'm fulfilling your demands."[18] According to contemporaneous reporting by al Jazeera's Robin Forestier-Walker, "Thousands of people are on the streets, cheering and hugging each other, jumping up and down and honking their horns ... things happened so quickly, I don't think the crowd was expecting this, but it is exactly what they wanted".[19]

• Programs of political parties in Armenia

• Official website (in Armenian)
• Payqar official website and underground newspaper (in Armenian)
• Haykakan Zhamanak website and newspaper. (in Armenian)
• Armenaker Kamilion has a substantial number of English translations of Pashinyan's articles in Payqar.