SEFILYAN REFUSES TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS OF THE COURT

AZG Armenian Daily #170
19/09/2007

Sefilian Trial

The Republic of Armenia Court of Appeals on Criminal and Military
Cases dismissed practically all the petitions of Jirayr Sefilyan’s and
Vardan Malkhasyan’s barristers during the trial, which continued today.

Jirayr Sefilian’s barrister Ara Zakarian emphasized in his statement
that the court’s decision to monitor the defendant’s telephone calls
was illegal, because such actions are only possible under the law
"On operational-investigation actions". There is no such law in
our country, yet. The National Assembly hasn’t still considered the
relevant draft-law. Based on this, the barrister petitioned not to
consider the decoding of telephone talks, since the monitoring of the
calls was done illegally. However, the court deliberated on the site
and decided that the monitoring was carried out with no violation of
the law, since Article 284 of the Code of Criminal Procedure defines
the order of carrying out investigative actions.

V. Malkhasyan’s barrister Mushegh Shushanyan recalled that in the
decoding of the defendant’s speech it is written "it is necessary
to fight against the authorities only with weapons" instead of the
words "it is necessary to fight against the authority with their
own weapons". This, according to him, was deliberately done by the
investigation agency to create false grounds for the accusation. Taking
into consideration the fact that the prosecuting party admitted
the fact of incorrect decoding of the above-mentioned fragment and
that the first judgment was based on the right variant, the judges
called the barrister not to insist on his petition of re-listening
to the speech recording. However, when M. Shushanyan insisted on his
petition, it was decided to postpone the consideration of the petition
till the stage of termination of court case.

Sefilyan’s barrister also petitioned not to consider the protocol on
search at the defendant’s work place as prosecution evidence. "Only
a criminal investigator on a concrete case may carry out search,
but Hakobyan is not a criminal investigator on a concrete case.

Consequently, he didn’t have the right to carry out investigative
action", A. Zakarian said. However, the court agreed to the
investigation agency’s fact on the necessity to search several
places simultaneously and didn’t satisfy the petition. Today the
public prosecutor Artur Lazarian asked to attach the xerocopy from
the "Explanatory dictionary of contemporary Armenian language" to
the case. In the dictionary, according to his confidence, barrister
Mushegh Shushanyan’s statement that only the imperative verbal form
(which was not used in Vardan Malkhasyan’s speech) can be understood
as an appeal, is disproved. M. Shushanyan said that the rendered
interpretation of the word "appeal" doesn’t disprove their case and
promised to speak on this in more detail later.

"The fact that my defendant didn’t take any actions after Vahan
Aroyan’s warning call proves that he didn’t intend to go into hiding,"
Ara Zakaryan, the counsel of Zhirayr Sefilyan.

According to him, one shouldn’t rule out that the leakage of
information about the planned detention of Zh.Sefilyan was organized
by special services to incite him to escape and then detain him. To
recall, several hours before Sefilyan was detained, Vahan Aroyan,
another participant in the Karabakh war, had rung up Zh.Sefilyan
and told him about the forthcoming arrest, referring to his friends’
information.

Today the Court of Appeals on Criminal and Military Cases finished the
trial phase. To note, tens of supporters of the opposition Heritage
Party and the Union of Armenian Volunteers held an extempore meeting
before the hearing. During the meeting, they demanded that Jirayr
Sefilian, Vardan Malkhasyan and Vahan Aroyan no more be prosecuted. The
prosecution, in their judgment is exceptionally a political command.

The next court session scheduled for September 25 will start with
the closing speeches of prosecution, defence, and the defendants.