Granting asylum to foreigners to be digitized in Armenia 

ArmInfo. The process of granting asylum to foreigners in Armenia will be fully digitalized. At its November 24 session, the RA National Assembly Committee on State and Legal Affairs approved amendments to the Law "On  Foreigners," "On State Duty," the Land Code, and the Code of  Administrative Offenses, submitted by the RA government.

As Deputy Minister of Internal Affairs Armen Ghazaryan noted in his  speech, the process of granting residence status will be digitalized,  following the example of granting temporary residence status based on  employment. The package stipulates the operating procedures of the  Unified Electronic Platform, its technical description, the procedure  for completing and submitting applications, the procedure for  granting temporary residence status based on employment or volunteer  work, and the form of the certificate certifying the legality of  residence issued to foreign citizens exempt from the work permit  requirement in accordance with international treaties.

In January 2022, a unified electronic platform for attracting foreign  workers, workpermit.am, was launched.  The platform provides  simultaneous access to all government agencies involved in the  process of granting residence status based on employment, reducing  time and streamlining administration. Previously, a work permit was  issued to the employer, and based on this, the employee received  residence status. The process was carried out through in-person  visits by applicants to two different agencies: the Ministry of Labor  and Social Affairs and the Police. Under the new procedure, the  process will be entirely electronic and requires a single application  to the government agency, and a residence status card must be  obtained from the Unified State Services Office.

Under the previous procedure, applicants paid for both a work permit  and a residence permit, while under the new procedure, they paid only  for the residence permit. The types of residence status have also  been revised. Currently, foreigners are granted temporary, permanent,  and special statuses for up to one, five, and ten years,  respectively. To avoid duplicating the grounds for residence status,  the draft law proposes repealing the provisions regarding the  granting of special residence status. The concept of a work visa has  also been clarified. According to current regulations, a guest visa  with the appropriate coding is issued to foreigners arriving in the  Republic of Armenia for the purpose of employment. However, there is  no legal provision that a foreigner arriving in the Republic of  Armenia for tourism cannot work in the Republic of Armenia. However,  many foreigners applying for temporary residence status based on  employment are rejected because they indicated tourism as the purpose  of their visit when applying for an entry visa to the Republic of  Armenia. If a work visa is introduced, this issue will no longer be  relevant.

The package will replace the work permit with a quota system.  According to current legislation, foreign citizens must obtain a work  permit to obtain residency status based on employment, except in  cases stipulated by law. A work permit is issued if there are no RA  citizens applying for the same vacancy.  However, this system has not  proven effective in practice, and of the 18,314 applications received  on the Workpermit.am platform from January 1, 2022 to August 22,  2025, only 10 were submitted by RA citizens.

In place of the described system, in order to ensure the  manageability of the migration situation in the Republic of Armenia,  including to protect the labor market, a quota system has been  introduced. This system will allow for the determination of the  desired size of migration flows in various formats based on an annual  analysis of their implementation.