From additional water intake to Amulsar: inaccessible villas and sunken facilities of officials on the shores of Lake Sevan, 11 September 2017

[Summary translation provided by the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre]

...Two months ago National Assembly of Armenia passed a bill on making amendments to the RA Law "On Approval of Annual and Comprehensive Programs for Restoration, Preservation, Reproduction and Use of Lake Sevan Ecosystem". As a result annual discharge from the lake was changed from 170mln to 270 mln cubic meters...

Environmentalists and activists boycotted these changes highlighting the beneficiaries of such changes, which are public officials, whose properties are on the shores, as well as the Sevan-Hrazdan hydropower cascade, which will benefit from increased electricity production thus additional incomes.

And yet the communities nearby were not consulted regarding these changes. No public hearing was organized. The residents are overall dissatisfied with the ecological situation in Sevan with regards to quality and quantity of water in the lake, as well as irrigation problems they face as a result of water mismanagement.