A YEAR AFTER THE CONSTITUTIONAL REFERENDUM

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[08:17 pm] 27 November, 2006

"With the Constitutional Referendum the authorities tried to prove once
more that they are the owners of the country", said leader of the New
Times party Aram Karapetyan in the National Press Club exactly a year
after the referendum. He noted today that the Armenian nation made sure
once more that it is impossible to change the authorities by the simple
way – throwing a ballot into the ballot box. He said that society
followed the advice of the opposition and boycotted the referendum.

"And the authorities fabricated the referendum; after that it was
not a complicated thing to fabricate the other laws", said Aram
Karapetyan. By the way, he announced that the constitutional "reforms"
did not good to the 90% of the society.

Secretary of the political council of Liberal-Progressive party of
Armenia Edward Antinyan informed that the only positive reform was
the every citizen can turn to the Constitutional Court. But speaking
about the reform, Mr. Antinyan said, "While the citizen passes through
all the instances and reaches the CC, his house is leveled to earth"
and an elitist building is constructed instead.

Representative of Justice bloc in the Central Electoral Committee
Felix Khachatryan reminded that in two electoral areas there had been
more than 1800 flaws, whereas the Committee stated there had been 1576
flaws in the whole republic. He also reminded about the 10 thousand
ballots which were printed and simply "lost" from the printing house.

RA first Ombudsman Larissa Alaverdyan also participated in the
meeting. She noted that since 1995 all the elections have used
so-called "black technologies".

Representatives of the Republic Party and the ARF Dashnaktsutyun were
also invited; but none of them showed up.