Turkish company processing visas for Armenians under scrutiny

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Armenian justice ministry is conducting inspections to reveal whether trusting Schengen visa services for Armenian citizens to a Turkish company complies with the country’s legislation.

As reported earlier, the German embassy in Armenia will stop processing applications for Schengen visas for Germany, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Austria starting from April 3 and transfer the function to VisaMetric. As it turned out later, VisaMetric is a Russian-Turkish consortium.

According to a statement from the ministry, such a decision was made due to major interest among the society and concerns of the Armenian citizens about transferring personal information to Turkey.

The Data Protection Authority of the ministry will also examine whether the company complies with the law during personal data processing, and prevent possible violations in the process.

Armenia and Turkey have no diplomatic relations. While Turkey recognized the modern Republic of Armenia shortly after the declaration of independence in September 1991, the two countries have not established diplomatic ties. In 1993, Turkey reacted to the war in Nagorno Karabakh by closing its border with Armenia out of support for Azerbaijan.