«Freedom of speech is not in its highest level all over the world. There are many challenges that journalistic organizations must give an adequate reaction to», - president of Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan said during the discussion on «Necessity of journalists' legal defence and legislative change», adding that e.g. of CIS countries Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Belarus very concrete and rude steps are made to confine freedom of speech.

“All the publishing houses, printing offices suspended their agreements with oppositional newspapers. A deeper and more worked out, disguised censorship is realized in Armenia”, he noted.

Organizations engaged in journalistic problems find it necessary to introduce amendments into criminal code and criminal procedure code. «Internews» public organization studied a number of acts of violence against journalists taken place during last two years. Only in one case Article 164 of RA Codex was used about «Hindering journalists' legal professional activities» was used. In all the other cases no action was brought and the guilty remained unpunished.

The participants of the discussion confessed that it's impossible to defend journalists only by law as we have problems with observing law, but those amendments will give an opportunity to improve the situation in some way. Projects has already been worked out suggesting amendments in the law about the RA police and in the criminal code. In particular, in the law about journalists another point is offered to be added to the acting 2 where strong measures of punishment are established against anybody acting violently against a journalist or his/her relatives.

The demand of introducing amendments into law the journalists also explain by the fact that officials in contrast to journalists are more defended. E.g. part 1 of the Article 316 of RA criminal code says that an act of violence against a representative of the power or his/her relative is punished by 300-500 times more sum than minimal wages are or to 5 years of imprisonment.