OSCE and Armenia sign agreement on implementing major Police Assistance Programme

YEREVAN, 29 July 2003 - A Memorandum of Understanding launching a major OSCE Police Assistance Programme in Armenia was signed today between the Armenian Police Service and the OSCE Office in Yerevan.

The signing ceremony comes after a visit in June by the OSCE's Senior Police Adviser, Richard Monk, and a follow-up trip by experts from the Organization's Strategic Police Matters Unit (SPMU) in Vienna.

The memorandum sets out a programme for conducting a detailed needs assessment between August and December 2003 in order to identify objectives, outputs and activities of the scheme.

"This is a first step in establishing a dynamic and transparent partnership between the OSCE and the police of Armenia," said Ambassador Roy Reeve, Head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan, speaking at the signing ceremony with General-Lieutenant Hayk Harutunyan, Director of the Police of Armenia.

Three thematic areas are foreseen by the project document:

• the pilot introduction of community policing in the Arabkir police district of Yerevan;



• the strengthening of the Armenian Police Training Centre for police recruits and refresher courses; and



• the strengthening of the emergency response capacity of the Yerevan police force.

The project will be implemented by the OSCE Office in Yerevan in co-operation with the Armenian Police Department, co-ordinated by SPMU of the OSCE Secretariat in Austria.

It is envisaged that the programme will contain projects, which will be explicitly aimed at creating a constructive partnership between the police and the population. Specifically, the community policing project will lead to the creation of a police/public consultative committee with civil action groups that will jointly address definition of priorities for focusing police resources. The project will also include recommendations to the Armenian Police on a number of modern law enforcement tools, methods and techniques.

The OSCE Office in Yerevan launched a programme on military and security activities in 2002, in line with the decision of the 2001 OSCE Ministerial Council Meeting to enhance the OSCE's role in police-related activities in conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation.

This includes provision of advice and assistance on the restructuring of police services, monitoring and training of existing police services, training on human rights and fundamental freedoms, capacity-building in all forms of policing, including support for integrated or multi-ethnic police services.