HOVSEP KHURSHUDYAN (Yerevan, Armenia)

He is dealing mainly with the spheres of Education, Culture and Youth, heading the «Free Citizen» Civic Initiatives’ Support Center NGO that work in the field of Non-formal education, especially for youth, in the field of Human rights, Democracy, Social dialog and cooperation, Civic campaigning, Public Speaking, EU institutions and European integration of the EaP countries.

He is also director of the «Arax Publishing House» LLC.

Hovsep has served as a member of the Central Electoral Commission of Armenia, and authored several draft laws. He also worked as a political analyst at the several Armenian dailies and magazines. For 4 years, he worked in the ACNIS — Armenian Center for National and International Studies, leading Armenian think tank (www.acnis.am) as an analyst. He has more than seventeen publications in Armenian peer-reviewed public policy journals in the fields of Economics, Diaspora, and Political Sciences. In 2016, because of his socio-political activism, Hovsep has been arrested and spent a month in a jail, adding to the list of Armenia’s political prisoners. After the recent Velvet Revolution in Armenia the political persecution against him was stopped.