First sitting of the National Road Safety Council of the Republic of Armenia (NRSC) was held last week in Yerevan. The sitting was chaired by the Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Tigran Sargsyan and was attended by all the Ministers involved in road safety of the country.
National Road Safety Council was established in March this year by the initiative of road safety NGO lead by the EASST- Armenia Partner Poghos Shahinyan and designed to unite all road safety stakeholders in the country in order to elaborate common and clear road safety stagey and mid-term plan.
At the opening of the sitting, the Prime Minister said: “Civil society urged us to set up a national council on road traffic safety. They had prepared quite a serious and comprehensive document which was subsequently finalized and discussed by corresponding government agencies. As a result, we have a government-approved strategic paper which seeks to cope with road traffic safety-related threats in the Republic of Armenia.”
Dmitry Sambuk, International Coordinator, FIA Foundation gave the participants brief overview of the plan and presented official symbol of upcoming UN Decade of Action on road safety 2011-2020.
Poghos Shahinyan: “This is a very significant – first ever – meeting of the Council and we managed to approve amendments to the Action Plan of the Strategy as well as approved the list of the working groups on improving each road safety element and agreed on the plan of upcoming events and activities to be held as a pre-launch of the Decade of Action”.
Later after the meeting both Mr Shahinyan and Mr Sambuk took part in a press conference and briefed the media on the outcome of the meeting and aims of the Decade of Action on road safety 2011-2020.
The rate of road fatalities in Armenia went 20% down comparing to previous years and visible success on considerable increase in wearing seat belts was also achieved by the NRSC of Armenia during the last year. EASST is fully supporting all activities of the NRSC of Armenia.
