YEREVAN MOVES TO DEPOLITICIZE LAW-ENFORCEMENT, JUDICIARY
By Emil Danielyan
Eurasia Daily Monitor, DC
March 6 2007
Armenia is embarking on a sweeping structural reform of its
law-enforcement system that is supposed to bring it into greater
conformity with European standards. Under a government bill approved
by parliament on February 26, Armenian prosecutors will be stripped of
their most significant authority: to conduct pre-trial investigations
involving arrests and interrogations of criminal suspects. That will
now become the exclusive prerogative of the police and the National
Security Service, the Armenian successor to the Soviet KGB.
Justice Minister David Harutiunian, the main author of the bill,
said earlier in February that implementation of the reform will
start as early as this June. The functions of Armenia’s Office of
the Prosecutor-General will thus be essentially reduced to defending
criminal charges in courts. The law-enforcement agency has until
now handled the majority of criminal cases, giving it ample powers
and corruption opportunities. Corruption usually takes the form of
bribes paid by suspects for a cover-up of minor or major crimes —
an entrenched practice dating back to the Soviet era.
Not surprisingly, the change has been vigorously resisted by the
influential Prosecutor-General Aghvan Hovsepian whose relationship
with Harutiunian has always been frosty. Tension between the two men
reportedly rose in spring last year, forcing President Robert Kocharian
to hold an emergency meeting of senior prosecutors and Justice
Ministry officials. Kocharian eventually sided with Harutiunian,
his longtime protege.
It was a serious setback for Hovsepian, who has extensive business
interests and a political patronage network. Meeting with officials
from the Council of Europe on February 12, Hovsepian indicated his
continuing objections to the bill in question. The chief prosecutor had
earlier publicly accused police officers of incompetence, saying that
his investigators routinely have to correct their blunders committed
in the initial stages of criminal inquiries.
That Armenian prosecutors and officers of the former KGB are generally
more competent than police detectives is a widely recognized fact. This
raises the question of whether Armenia’s Police Service is able to
shoulder the main burden of investigating and solving crimes from now
on. According to Harutiunian, the police will be reinforced by many
experienced investigators from the Office of the Prosecutor-General and
its territorial divisions to be considerably downsized later this year.
Although still low by Western and ex-Soviet standards, Armenia’s
official crime rate increased by 10 percent last year. Particularly
alarming was a 36% surge in the number of murders reported by
law-enforcement authorities. They have yet to solve the most
high-profile of those crimes, including a September car bombing in
Yerevan that killed a high-ranking tax official.
In all likelihood, the structural overhaul of the procuracy will not
have any bearing on widespread mistreatment of suspects in custody.
Extraction of "confessions" under duress remains commonplace in
Armenia, despite its parliament’s ratification in 2002 of the European
conventions on human rights and the prevention of torture.
The Armenian government has done little to eliminate the illegal
practice.
Justice Minister Harutiunian first unveiled plans for the
re-distribution of law-enforcement powers in July 2006 as part of a
broader reform of Armenia’s security apparatus and judicial system.
Shortly afterwards, the Armenian parliament adopted a Judicial Code
that envisages important changes in the structure and powers of the
country’s notoriously subservient courts. Harutiunian and other senior
officials said this would help to make them more independent of the
government and law-enforcement bodies.
The Armenian judiciary had already undergone a radical structural
reform over the past decade. Nevertheless, local courts still rarely
acquit criminal suspects, investigate torture allegations, or make
other decisions going against the government’s wishes. Corruption
among Armenian judges is also a serious problem. Harutiunian, who
plays a key role in the selection of judges, is believed to exert
considerable undue influence on their rulings.
Far more important for judicial independence are some of the recently
enacted amendments to Armenia’s constitution that significantly curb
the Armenian president’s authority to appoint and dismiss virtually
all judges. More specifically, the future presidents of the republic
will not control, at least by law, a key body that makes mandatory
recommendations for judicial appointments.
There are already some indications that Armenian judges feel
emboldened by this change, even if it will take years to make a
difference. Speaking at an annual meeting of state prosecutors on
February 2, one of Prosecutor-General Hovsepian’s deputies, Gagik
Jahangirian, lambasted courts for handing down "evidently lenient"
verdicts in the course of 2006. "We are not going to put up with that,"
he warned.
The remarks prompted an unusually sharp response from the Union of
Judges of Armenia two weeks later. In a written statement, it said
the judges "will not tolerate" threats to their independence and will
continue to apply "stricter requirements" to prosecutors. "We advise
[prosecutors] to switch from groundless accusations and pointless
threats … to concrete actions that will raise the defense of state
prosecution to a proper professional level," read the statement.
Jahangirian, who previously worked as Armenia’s chief military
prosecutor, was particularly furious with the effective acquittal on
December 22 of three army soldiers accused of murdering two fellow
conscripts. The three young men were unexpectedly set free by Armenia’s
highest appeals court seven months after being sentenced to life
imprisonment on what human rights groups consider to be trumped-up
charges. It was the first known case of an Armenian court rebuffing
military prosecutors.
(Aravot, February 27; Statement by the Union of Judges of Armenia,
February 16; RFE/RL Armenia Report, February 12; Haykakan Zhamanak,
February 3)