dpa-AFX International ProFeed
August 9, 2019 Friday 8:16 PM GMT
Criminal case against Armenia's ex-president lands in European court
PARIS (dpa-AFX) – Armenia's Constitutional Court is seeking advice from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) about a law under which former president Robert Kocharyan is facing trial. The Strasbourg court announced on Friday that it had received a request from the Armenian court for an advisory opinion about a criminal code article dealing with the overthrow of the constitutional order. Kocharyan is accused of overthrowing the constitutional order by authorizing a violent 2008 crackdown on protests against his protege Serzh Sargsyan's disputed victory in presidential polls. The ECHR said the Armenian Constitutional Court was considering two cases about the constitutionality of the article, one brought by Kocharyan himself and the other by a court in the capital Yerevan. The former president surrendered himself to a Yerevan jail in June after a court ordered him remanded pending trial. Armenia's current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan rose to power in April last year as he led protests in opposition to the appointment of Sargsyan to the prime ministerial post at the time. Sargsyan, who had just reached his term limit as president after serving a decade, was prime minister for only a week before he decided to resign amid the protests. The case is the second where a national court has requested an advisory opinion from the ECHR under a protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights that came into effect last year. In the first such case, the court ruled in April that French authorities did not have to register the intended mother of a child born abroad to a surrogate mother as the child's mother on its birth certificate, as long as it was possible to establish the legal parental relationship of the intended mother by other means.