Tert, Armenia
Nov 13 2009

Witnessed First-Hand: New Reports Suggest Teaching Rules of Law to
Armenian Police
15:23 ¢ 13.11.09

Today, the report Monitoring of Freedom of Peaceful Assembly in
Armenia, carried out by the Armenian Helsinki Committee, was presented
at the Yerevan Congress hotel. Ambassador of OSCE Yerevan Office
Sergey Kapinos, Special Representative of CoE in Armenia Sylvia Zehen,
Deputy Head of OSCE Human Rights Department Assia Ivantcheva, as well
as experts from the Council of Europe and Armenia participated in the
report’s discussion.

The experts, touching upon the necessity of peaceful assemblies, spoke
very mildly on the violence during those demonstrations and the
attempts at hindering them. They spoke more about the necessity to
improve and develop the corresponding laws on assemblies.

OSCE/ODIHR (Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights)
expert Nil Jarmann stated that much work has been done ever since 2004
in order to improve the law on freedom of peaceful assembly and in
order to adjust them according to international criteria, but,
according to Jarmann, the law is only good on paper if it is
implemented well. After the speeches, Armenian Helsinki Committee
President Avetik Ishkhanyan presented the report.

Ishkhanyan said that the work presented in the report was carried out
from September 26, 2008, to June 30, 2009. It is stated in the report
that political rallies prevailed in the overall rallies, during which
unjustified actions by police officers, skirmishes, apprehension, use
of force, and so forth, were bserved. They also observed that police
officers were quite well armed in the case of 46 rallies. The report
also states that in case of any opposition rally, artificial
impediments were created for the organizers of the rallies. The report
also referred to the well-known `case of seven,’ political prisoner
Tigran Arakelyan’s arrest, and so on.

Referring to police officers’ behaviour during the rallies, Ishkhanyan
stated that they are often unaware of the laws, therefore they suggest
that police officers receive special training on the rules of the law.
He also said they included in the report what they witnessed
first-hand.