Imagine you work for a civil society organisation (CSO) and need extra support to scale up your projects, so you decide to involve volunteers in your activities. They bring the diverse skills and talents, which would allow your organisation to do more for the communities you serve. However, if your organisation happened to be based in Armenia, you would have faced several barriers in doing so, due to the unclear legal situation around volunteering. Regulations were scattered across different laws, leading to uncertainty. Would you be sanctioned for using volunteers’ unpaid labour? Would the services you provide qualify as entrepreneurial activity, in which volunteers were prohibited to be engaged? These were just some of the issues that hindered Armenian CSOs from effectively leveraging volunteer support to achieve their mission.
Removing excessive regulations to support volunteer work
The attempts to address existing legislative gaps around volunteering started back in 2017, when the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of Armenia developed the first draft law “On Volunteer Work”. This version was heavily criticised for imposing heavy burdens on organisations engaging volunteers. In 2020 and 2022, several draft law versions followed, some introducing enabling provisions, others restricting the rights of volunteers and host organisations alike.
ECNL has been working together with Transparency International Anticorruption Center (TIAC) to ensure a legal reform that supports and protects volunteer work from the outset. We have offered various types of assistance in an effort to remove excessive regulations while upholding clarity on all aspects of volunteering. We provided detailed legal comments identifying problematic provisions in the bills and shared best practices from other countries that could be adapted to the local context. Thanks to the support of USAID, the European Union (through the CSO Meter project) and the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, we have been able to help partners advance a favourable environment for both volunteers and organisations hosting them.
The National Assembly of Armenia adopted the law in June 2023. Signed by the President in July, the law entered in force in October, 3 months after its official publication. Not only does the new law incorporate the majority of the recommendations in the CSO Meter reports, but it also addresses those put forth by TIAC and other CSOs during the parliamentary hearings in 2023, making it a huge win for civil society in Armenia.
Thanks to these efforts, volunteering in Armenia has become easier, because:
- The law clearly defines the legal basis of volunteering and volunteer status.
- The law allows volunteer work to be recognised as work experience.
- Volunteers have the right to ask for reimbursement of additional expenses arising from their volunteer work. The maximum amount of such compensation is determined in advance between the volunteer and the organisation in writing.
- The law sets the framework of health and safety guarantees for volunteers, as well as the possibility of insurance.
- There are now clear regulations regarding the engagement of international volunteers. Thus, organisations hosting international volunteers will be able to more easily arrange volunteers’ visa and/or residence permit issues.
- The law clearly defines volunteers’ liability: host organisations are obliged to compensate the damage caused to the volunteer while performing voluntary work, and the volunteer is obliged to compensate the material damage caused to the host organisation as a result of his/her action or inaction while performing voluntary work. These provisions are important because they provide clear legal basis for possible demands and claims between the parties.
- Host organisations can now involve volunteers in their economic activities.
- Organisations will not have to pay tax on the reimbursement of their volunteer’s travel expenses (including payment of per diems in the same manner as to the employees)․
- Public organisations and foundations are specifically mentioned in the list of organisations that can host volunteers. Previous draft law versions primarily listed state and community institutions as volunteer hosts, so this highlights the significance of volunteering work for non-profit organisations.
- Organisations’ obligation to engage volunteers in their educational programmes, as suggested in earlier drafts, was in the end removed. This gives flexibility especially for smaller CSOs that are not obliged to organise educational programmes and special trainings for their volunteers.
- Volunteers can now be involved in any non-profit organisations pursuing any goals not prohibited by law. (One of the draft law versions would have limited the goals for which people could volunteer.)
- The law defines “one-time action”, meaning that signing a contract on voluntary work is now not mandatory in case volunteers participate only in a one-time action, such as a campaign to clean a forest. This saves CSOs from having to sign contracts with hundreds of people that they would engage for one-off support only.
Out of the 14 issues that ECNL and TIAC identified as serious flaws in different draft versions throughout the years, only 1 problem remained in the adopted version. This is the requirement to have a contract signed for something to qualify as genuine volunteer work (one-time actions are not considered volunteering). In case there is no contract signed, the volunteer work is considered illegal, and the organisation can be subject to fines. This provision is highly problematic, as it can potentially discourage spontaneous and informal volunteer efforts.
The adopted law promises to be a transformative step for Armenian CSOs, allowing organisations to harness the power of volunteer labour and providing essential protections for volunteers themselves. ECNL will keep working with TIAC and partners to monitor how the law is implemented to ensure volunteering practices remain unhindered in Armenia.