Opposition figure released as rights monitors arrive in Armenia

Associated Press Worldstream
June 12, 2004 Saturday

YEREVAN, Armenia — Authorities in Armenia have released an opposition
leader from jail after European human rights envoys arrived in the
former Soviet republic, a lawyer said Saturday.

Former Defense Minister Vagarshak Arutyunian was released late Friday,
but the case against him has not been closed and he is barred from
leaving the capital Yerevan, his lawyer Robert Grigorian said.

Grigorian said the release came after an appeal from the nation’s
human rights ombudsman, but he noted that it occurred the same day
that two representatives of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council
of Europe, or PACE, arrived in Armenia for talks on the political
situation and judicial reform.

Arutyunian was arrested during an April 12 protest in which
demonstrators called for the resignation of President Robert Kocharian,
and is accused of attempting to seize power and calling for change
in the country’s constitutional order. Six people arrested during
opposition protests remain jailed, Grigorian said.

Opposition leaders in the small, poverty-plagued Caucasus Mountain
country have organized a series of protests this spring aimed at
forcing the resignation of Kocharian, who won a second term last year
in an election they claim was marred by fraud. The April 12 protest
was forcefully broken up by police.