They are due to be gradually provided to the ministry’s Penitentiary Service by the end of next year. It currently has only 12 such vans transporting inmates to and from prisons or detention centers.
The ministry says that the service is struggling to carry out escort rides that have increased by 20 percent annually in recent years and totaled over 28,000 in 2024. It gave no reason for that rise in its request for the funding approved by the government on Thursday.
Zaruhi Hovannisian, who leads a group of human rights activists monitoring prison conditions in Armenia, attributed the allocation to an increased number of individuals who are held in detention while standing trial on various charges.
“[The prison escorts] mainly concern arrested persons because court hearings, you know, are much more often related to pre-trial detention than other specific matters,” she told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Hovannisian complained that Armenian law-enforcement authorities continue to resort to pre-trial arrests “on a massive scale” despite the introduction of alternative measures such as house arrest.
This is especially true for criminal cases involving opposition figures and other critics of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian. Dozens of them have been arrested and prosecuted in the last few months alone. Virtually all of them deny accusations levelled against them as politically motivated.
More than 2,800 people are held in Armenian prisons at present. Most of them have not yet been convicted and sentenced by courts.
Convicts accounted for a bigger share of Armenia’s prison population that stood at almost 3,900 a decade ago. The country’s crime rate has risen significantly since then.