Controversial Amulsar gold mine opens in Armenia after long delay

Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has opened the Amulsar gold mine — a long-stalled project that has been in the pipeline since 2016 amidst continued environmental protests. Pashinyan said the opening of the controversial mine without protests was a ‘success story’.

The Amulsar gold mine is located in Armenia’s Vayots Dzor province, near the resort town of Jermuk, and is operated by Lydian Armenia company, a subsidiary of Lydian International, registered in the British tax haven of Jersey.

Construction of the gold mine began in 2016 but has been halted since June 2018 due to local protesters blocking access to the project. The blockade ended during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020. Environmental activists have expressed concerns that the mining process and the use of cyanide to extract gold could affect the Arpa and Vorotan rivers, and consequently Lake Sevan — Armenia’s largest freshwater reserve.

However, Lydian Armenia argues that it was introducing the best international practices in health and safety, environmental management, and social responsibility. They cite the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) that they conducted in accordance with international standards back in 2016.

Following the 2018 Velvet Revolution in Armenia, the issue gained prominence again, as some of the leading activists against the mine, including Lena Nazaryan, a current member of the ruling Civil Contract party, were elected to parliament.

While there was a lack of public trust in the assessment ordered by Lydian Armenia, Pashinyan’s government ordered a $450,000 assessment of the mine from Earth Link & Advanced Resources Development (ELARD).

In the results published in 2019, the company identified several omissions and issues in the project’s Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and said that the assessment presented by Lydian was incomplete. However, the report also concluded that the mine would not damage the local ecology, particularly the groundwater, contrary to the fears of locals and environmental activists. Following the new assessment, Pashinyan announced in 2021 that ‘there is a possibility that the mine will open’. He argued that, in a country facing the risk of conflict, when tensions rise, tourism will decline, but the mine will still boost the economy. In 2024, the government greenlit the mine.

The grand opening

On Saturday morning, Pashinyan published a video of himself arriving at the site of the main opening event by helicopter, accompanied by government officials and party members. In his speech, he described the event as a ‘success story’, describing the process leading to it as practice the government should adopt in other investment projects.

‘We have to talk about why we can organise this event in such a ceremonial environment without protest or similar actions nearby’, Pashinyan said.

He said that the government tried to address public concerns in the past years by raising awareness and showing Armenians that the project was theirs and not something from outside.

Lydian Armenia holds a 75.5% share in the mine, while the Armenian government holds 12.5%.

‘Let us finally state that the mineral resources that turned into gold before our eyes today belong to Armenia and are the property of the people of Armenia. And it has been of utmost importance to us to demonstrate that this wealth will serve the development and prosperity of Armenia’, Pashinyan said.

During the opening, Economy Minister Gevorg Papoyan said that the Amulsar gold mine is expected to generate an annual $130 million in taxes, duties, and royalties for Armenia’s state budget, and could boost the country’s GDP by around 1.5%. However, Papoyan believes that the significance of the Amulsar gold mine project goes beyond investment and tax revenues.

‘This is not just a story about major investments, job creation, and substantial tax revenues. It is also a story about standards — mining standards’, he said

The government’s representative on Lydian Armenia’s board of directors, Gnel Sanosyan, said three communities near the Amulsar gold mine — Jermuk, Vayk, and Sisian — will receive $7–9 million annually. Sanosyan said that Lydian Armenia has also committed to allocating $5 million toward the establishment of the Jermuk National Park.

Territorial Administration Minister Davit Khudatyan said mining and tourism can coexist without harming nature. The minister also addressed the opportunities that the mine’s operation would create for communities in Vayots Dzor and Syunik provinces. Among those benefits, he said, were thousands of well-paid jobs and stable contributions to communities, anticipated changes to schools, nurseries, roads, other major infrastructure projects and social programmes funded by tax revenues.

An opening ahead of COP17

The opening of the mine came ahead of the COP17 biological diversity convention scheduled to take place from 19–30 October in Yerevan. There, governments will gather to evaluate their collective progress towards achieving 23 ambitious biodiversity targets by 2030. The conference, symbolised by the endemic Yerevan Blue Butterfly, will emphasise closing implementation gaps, scaling up international nature finance, and finalising equitable mechanisms for sharing the financial benefits of digital genetic resources.

Back in 2020, Armenian civil society organisations and the CEE Bankwatch Network — the largest network of grassroots environmental and human rights groups in Central and Eastern Europe — applied to the Bern Convention, blaming the Armenian government for breaking international agreements on biodiversity by funding the Amulsar mine and risking the protected areas around it. The convention recommended that the government halt the process.

Over the following years, various groups submitted different complaints, raising concerns about corruption, the exclusion of affected communities from decision-making processes, and the undermining of social licences.

After Pashinyan’s remark about the mine opening without new protests, some long-standing anti-Amulsar environmental activists took to social media to explain why they were no longer protesting the mine.

Tehmine Yenokyan, from the Green Armenia NGO, was involved in court proceedings for 10 years when, back in 2015, eleven residents of the village of Gndevaz and two non-governmental organisations filed a lawsuit seeking to have a number of legal acts that gave the green light to the Amulsar project declared unlawful. Their requests were partially met in 2024.

‘If one day you decide to ask where Amulsar’s guardians, the environmentalists, are, remember that no one took the winning Administrative Court verdict seriously. The opinions of the community’s residents counted for nothing, and no official public hearings on the Amulsar issue were held in Jermuk. Even the violation of the Bern Convention, and the Committee’s demand to halt construction and carry out a new EIA wasn’t worth a penny’, she wrote on social media following Pashinyan’s Saturday remarks.

Another former Amulsar activist, Arman Gharibyan, wrote:

‘Preempting some people’s hysterical comments along the lines of “you used to fight for Amulsar, so why are you silent now?”, let me say that after seven years I am older, I have less energy, less free time, and weaker health. I have lived through a war and the deaths of loved ones, dealt with cancer, and run into very great injustices and disappointments…’

At the same time, Lydian Armenia has previously sued MPs, activists, lawyers, and even a government ministry for speaking out against the mine.

On 10 October, Armenian civil society representatives condemned the launch of the Amulsar gold mine, calling it a threat to the country’s environmental security and international obligations. They stated that the development of the mine ahead of COP17 is in contradiction to Armenia’s declared environmental goals and demanded an immediate halt to the mine’s operations, a new environmental impact assessment and a review of state support for the project.