Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
The Jamestown Foundation
May 26 2005
AMENDMENTS TO KEY LAWS UNLIKELY TO FOSTER ARMENIA’S DEMOCRATIZATION
By Emil Danielyan
Thursday, May 26, 2005
The Armenian authorities claim to have taken a further step toward
meeting their membership commitments to the Council of Europe with
the May 20 passage of amendments to the country’s controversial laws
on elections and rallies. President Robert Kocharian’s leading
political allies say the move will guarantee freedom of assembly and
seriously complicate chronic electoral fraud, the principal source of
political tension in Armenia.
However, their political opponents and leading civic groups have
dismissed the amendments as insignificant and misleading. Indeed,
they allow the ruling regime, which has failed to hold a single free
and fair election, to continue to exercise full control over all
electoral processes and to restrict anti-government demonstrations.
Besides, the regime has never quite complied with the existing laws
that declare vote rigging to be a serious crime and that guarantee
Armenians’ basic human and civil rights. This appears to be the
reason why the Council of Europe’s and other pan-European structures’
emphasis on legislative reform in Armenia has yielded few tangible
results in terms of the democratization of its deeply flawed
political system.
On paper, the amended law on public gatherings makes it somewhat
easier for opposition groups to stage demonstrations. The authorities
can now stop or disperse such protests only if they result in
“violations of the law” and feature calls for a “violent overthrow”
of the government. The legislation does not specify what those
violations could be. It also retained a highly controversial clause
whereby no rallies can be held within a 150-meter radius of the
presidential palace in Yerevan and other “strategic” facilities such
as the nuclear power plant at Metsamor.
The law in question was enacted in May 2004 at the height of an
opposition campaign of anti-Kocharian demonstrations. Legal experts
from the Council of Europe and the OSCE concluded afterward that it
does not meet European standards for freedom of assembly. They also
criticized Armenia’s Electoral Code for not envisaging sufficient
safeguards against vote irregularities.
The amendments to the code give more rights to proxies of election
candidates on polling days and should enable the police to sort out
Armenia’s notoriously inaccurate vote registers. More importantly, it
allows Kocharian to appoint only one member of each electoral
commission.
Kocharian until now named three of the nine members of the country’s
Central Election Commission and its territorial divisions. The other
commission seats are controlled by the six parties and blocs
represented in parliament. Only two of them are in opposition to
Kocharian.
The two vacant commission seats will now be given to another
pro-presidential parliamentary faction and Armenia’s Court of
Appeals, all of whose members were appointed by Kocharian. The
Armenian leader and his allies will thus retain their overwhelming
control of the bodies handling elections at various levels.
Not surprisingly, the opposition is not happy with the legislative
changes. They were also criticized on May 24 by the Partnership for
Open Society, a coalition of more than three dozen local
non-governmental organizations advocating political reform. Its
leaders claimed that some of the amendments would even facilitate
fraud. One of amendments stipulates that ballot papers no longer have
to be signed by at least three members of a precinct commission in
order to be considered valid.
The NGOs also slammed Council of Europe experts for reportedly
praising the amendments. They had already denounced the pan-European
organization’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) for its October 2004
resolution that made a largely positive assessment of Yerevan’s human
rights record just months after an unprecedented crackdown on the
Armenian opposition.
The 46-nation assembly noted its “excellent cooperation” with the
Armenian authorities, echoing statements by officials from the
Council of Europe’s top governing body, the Committee of Ministers.
One of them, Pietro Ago, declared during a February 2004 visit to
Yerevan that the authorities “should be congratulated for their good
actions” relating to political reform. The Italian diplomat pointed
to the abolition of the death penalty in Armenia and to the passage
of new laws on mass media, the human rights ombudsman, and
alternative service.
The enactment of those laws was among the key conditions for
Armenia’s accession to the Council of Europe in January 2001.
However, the country has hardly become more democratic since then; it
has even regressed in some areas. The Council of Europe membership
did not prevent the authorities from scandalously closing A1+, the
sole Armenian television channel not controlled by Kocharian, in
April 2002. Ironically, they used one of the laws cited by Ago to
pull the plug on the popular channel.
Furthermore, the Armenian presidential and parliamentary elections
held in 2003 were again judged undemocratic by Western observers, and
the U.S. State Department continues to describe the Kocharian
administration’s human rights record as “poor.”
The Armenian authorities have repeatedly demonstrated that they can
easily trample a law or constitutional clause if it threatens their
grip on power. They have rejected the few Council of Europe
recommendations that pose such a threat. The authorities, for
example, have stubbornly resisted demands to scrap the Soviet-era
practice of “administrative arrests,” which they have used to
imprison hundreds of opposition activists and supporters. Nor have
they agreed to significantly curb Kocharian’s sweeping powers as part
of a planned reform of the Armenian constitution.
(RFE/RL Armenia Report, May 19, 24; February 6, 2004)