New law could quadruple number of Armenians

YEREVAN (Reuters) - Armenia's parliament has passed the first reading of a bill giving ethnic Armenians the right to hold dual citizenship, a law which could almost quadruple the number of the country's nationals around the world.

Wedged between Georgia, Turkey, Iran and Azerbaijan, Armenia has a population of just 3.2 million but a diaspora of 8 million spread across the globe, mainly in the United States, Russia and France.

The new law, debated on Tuesday, would allow the emigres to gain Armenian citizenship.

Most fled the region after World War One, following mass killings of Armenians by Ottoman Turks in 1915. Turkey denies there was systematic genocide and says large numbers of both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing.

"Adoption of this law is conditioned by a wish to restore human, civil and historical justice," Gegham Manukian, a member of the parliament and one of the authors of the law, told Reuters.

Armenians supported the idea of dual citizenship in a November 2005 referendum on constitutional amendments. The new proposal needs to pass three readings in parliament to become law.