Thursday, July 8, 2021
Armenian Opposition Bloc Condemns Fresh Arrests
• Susan Badalian
Armenia - Former President Robert Kocharian and senior members of his opposition
bloc hold an election campaign meeting in Syunik region, June 7, 2021.
The National Security Service (NSS) reportedly raided the offices of Armenia’s
largest mining company and detained the mayor of a nearby town on Thursday in
what the main opposition Hayastan alliance condemned as a continuing government
crackdown on its members.
NSS officers searched the office and the apartment of Kajaran Mayor Manvel
Paramazian in the morning before taking him to Yerevan for unknown reasons. The
security agency did not explain their actions in the following hours.
Paramazian’s lawyer, Yervand Varosian, said in the evening that he is still
unaware of his client’s whereabouts or the reason for his detention.
“I’ve only heard something ludicrous: someone had bought some land and resold it
to I don’t know whom,” Varosian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Paramazian was already briefly arrested last December on kidnapping and assault
charges denied by him. An Armenian court is scheduled to start his trial on
Monday.
Varosian suggested that the authorities are keen to bring more charges against
the opposition-linked mayor because they realize that the court is unlikely to
convict him.
“All this became predictable after the Hayastan bloc won the majority of votes
in Kajaran,” the lawyer said, referring to the snap parliamentary elections held
on June 20.
Armenia - Kajaran Mayor Manvel Paramazian.
Paramazian has run Kajaran, an industrial town in Armenia’s southeastern Syunik
province, since 2016. He was among the heads of more than a dozen provincial
communities who issued late last year statements condemning Prime Minister Nikol
Pashinian’s handling of the autumn war with Azerbaijan and demanding his
resignation.
Two other Syunik mayors were also indicted late last year. One of them, Arush
Arushanian, runs a community comprising the town of Goris and surrounding
villages.
Arushanian was questioned on Wednesday by another law-enforcement agency, the
Special Investigative Service (SIS), in connection with this week’s arrest of a
local official heading one of those villages, Karahunj.
The official, Lusine Avetian, was charged with ordering five Karahunj residents
to vote for Hayastan after allocating financial assistance to them from the
local government budget. It was not clear if she will plead guilty to the
accusation.
According to some Armenian media outlets, SIS investigators are trying to get
Avetian to implicate Arushanian in the alleged pressure exerted on the voters.
Arushanian’s lawyer, Erik Aleksanian, did not rule out such a possibility,
saying that the charges leveled against the village chief are politically
motivated.
The Goris municipality insisted, for its part, that Avetian was not in a
position to give any cash handouts. It said such decisions could only be made by
a municipal commission headed by Arushanian.
Armenia - Former President Robert Kocharian (R) and senior members of his
Hayastan alliance, Vahe Hakobian (L) and Ishkhan Saghatelian, at an election
campaign rally in Yerevan, June 9, 2021.
The embattled Syunik mayors and a former provincial governor, Vahe Hakobian,
lead an opposition party affiliated with Hayastan, the official runner-up in the
June 20 elections. Hakobian is also a major shareholder in the Zangezur
Copper-Molybdenum Combine (ZCMC), a mining giant employing more than 4,000
people, many of them Kajaran residents.
News reports quoted Hakobian as saying that NSS officers also searched on
Thursday morning the ZCMC offices. He said they detained one of the company
executives. The NSS did not confirm or deny that.
During the election campaign Pashinian vowed to crack down on ZCMC’s “corrupt”
owners and wage “political vendettas” against local government officials
supporting the opposition. His political allies demanded after the elections
that those elected mayors step down. They pointed to official vote results that
showed the ruling Civil Contract party scoring a landslide victory.
Meanwhile, Hayastan, which is headed by former President Robert Kocharian issued
a statement on Thursday condemning the continuing “repressions” against its
members and saying that they will “further deepen the political crisis” in
Armenia.
“The purpose of these illegal actions is clear: to weaken the [new] parliament’s
largest opposition group and distract it from its efforts to confront internal
and external threats facing the country,” said the statement. It said
Kocharian’s bloc will continue to challenge the “regime that has brought the
country to a disaster.”
Pashinian Offers To Cooperate With Tsarukian
Armenia - Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian meets with Prosperous Armenia Party
leader Gagik Tsarukian, Yerevan, July 8, 2021.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian on Thursday met with Gagik Tsarukian and
expressed readiness to cooperate with his Prosperous Armenia Party (BHK) after
its failure to win any parliament seats for the first time since its
establishment in 2006.
The meeting was part of Pashinian’s ongoing consultations with mostly small
political groups that will not be represented in Armenia’s new parliament
elected on June 20. He told Tsarukian that his government is ready to work with
them in confronting challenges facing the country.
According to the official election results, the BHK won just under 4 percent of
the vote, failing to clear the 5 percent legal threshold to enter the
parliament. It had finished second in the previous parliamentary elections held
in 2018, garnering more than 8 percent.
Tsarukian’s party has not yet clarified whether it considers the June 20 vote
democratic. The two other, more hardline opposition forces that won seats in the
new parliament have rejected the official results as fraudulent.
In his opening remarks at the meeting publicized by his press office, Pashinian
said the BHK remains an “influential force” in the domestic political arena
despite its election fiasco.
“I would like to hear your views about further political developments, about
what we can do to make the extra-parliamentary opposition and the BHK in
particular and the government more responsive to each other,” he went on.
Armenia - Prosperous Armenia Party leader Gagik Tsarukian greets supporters
during an election campaign rally in Yerevan, June 17, 2021.
Pashinian said the government is open to relevant proposals from those groups.
“I don’t think that good ideas are generated only by those who get more votes in
parliamentary elections,” he said.
Tsarukian replied vaguely that his party will continue to “stand with the
people.”
Tsarukian demanded Pashinian’s resignation in June 2020, accusing the prime
minister of incompetence and misrule. Shortly afterwards he was controversially
prosecuted on what he called politically motivated charges. He was arrested in
September but freed on bail almost one month later.
Like other opposition groups, the BHK blamed Pashinian for Armenia’s defeat in
the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh and demanded his resignation. It joined late
last year a grouping of opposition parties that staged street protests in a bid
topple the premier.
Tsarukian and most of his associates kept a low profile and avoided strong
verbal attacks on the government this spring, fuelling media speculation about
their readiness to strike deals with Pashinian. The BHK leader repeatedly stated
during the recent election campaign that he would not join a possible coalition
government led by Pashinian as a result of the elections.
Pashinian Looks Forward To New Judicial Appointments
• Naira Nalbandian
Armenia - A courtroom in Yerevan, 8Jun2017.
The Armenian government approved on Thursday a proposal to hire new judges who
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian said will contribute to judicial reforms in the
country.
The 20 judges are to be nominated by the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC) and
confirmed by Armenia’s newly elected parliament in which Pashinian’s Civil
Contract party will have a comfortable majority. The SJC, which oversees
Armenia’s courts, formally proposed their appointment last week, citing
amendments to the Judicial Code enacted earlier this year.
Under the government-drafted amendments, the new judges will mostly deal with
pre-trial arrests of criminal suspects and search warrants sought by
law-enforcement bodies. They will supposedly reduce the workload of courts
increasingly overwhelmed by pending criminal and civil cases.
Speaking at a weekly cabinet meeting in Yerevan, Pashinian said the upcoming
judicial appointments will be part of “substantive reforms” of the Armenian
judiciary initiated by his administration. He said the new judges will bring
“new insights and new approaches” to the courts of first instance and the Court
of Appeals.
The government moved to increase the number of judges after Armenian courts
refused to allow law-enforcement bodies to arrest dozens of opposition leaders
and members as well as other anti-government activists. Virtually all of those
individuals were prosecuted in connection with angry protests sparked by
Pashinian’s handling of the autumn war in Nagorno-Karabakh.
The prime minister charged in December that the judiciary has become part of the
country’s “pseudo-elite” trying to topple him after the disastrous war.
Critics claim that Pashinian simply wants to install loyal judges who would duly
allow the pre-trial arrests of his political opponents and execute other
government orders.
The SJC is empowered to not only nominate judges but also sanction and fire
them. Its chairman, Ruben Vartazarian, was controversially suspended and charged
with obstruction of justice in April after Pashinian’s political allies accused
him of encouraging courts to free the arrested government critics.
Vartazarian denies the accusations. He has said the authorities ordered the
criminal proceedings in a bid to replace him with Gagik Jahangirian, an SJC
member reputedly allied to Pashinian.
Jahangirian was named as acting head of the SJC pending the outcome of the
criminal investigation because of being the oldest member of the judicial
watchdog. According to some media outlets, he has since been trying to increase
government influence on courts.
Jahangirian criticized Pashinian’s political team in January for not “purging”
the judiciary. He called for “getting rid of judges who committed blatant human
rights violations.”
Jahangirian himself was accused by media and civic activists of committing
serious human rights abuses when he served as Armenia’s chief military
prosecutor from 1997-2006.
Armenian Court Upholds Arrest Of Pro-Opposition Doctor
• Anush Mkrtchian
Armenia - Former President Robert Kocharian (R) greets Armen Charchian, director
of the Izmirlian Medical Center, during a rally in Yerevan, May 9, 2021.
Armenia’s Court of Appeals on Thursday refused to order the release of an
opposition-linked prominent surgeon arrested late last month on charges of
pressuring his subordinates to participate in the June 20 parliamentary
elections.
Armen Charchian, the director of Yerevan’s Izmirlian Medical Center, was
prosecuted after a non-governmental organization publicized a leaked audio
recording of his meeting with hospital personnel.
Charchian, who ran for the parliament on the main opposition Hayastan bloc’s
ticket, told them that they must vote in the snap elections or face “much
tougher treatment” by the hospital management. He was indicted under an article
of the Criminal Code that prohibits any coercion of voters.
Charchian rejects the accusations as baseless and politically motivated.
Hayastan’s leadership and the Armenian Apostolic Church, which owns the
hospital, have repeatedly demanded his release from custody.
The doctor’s lawyers appealed against a lower court’s June 23 decision to allow
a law-enforcement agency to arrest him pending investigation.
A Court of Appeals judge, Lusine Abgarian, upheld that decision, drawing a
strong condemnation from the lawyers. They claimed that she handed down the
ruling under strong pressure from the Armenian government.
“This is a mockery of jurisprudence,” one of the lawyers, Erik Andreasian, told
reporters. He insisted that the court and the investigators have “no grounds”
hold his client in pre-trial detention.
Aleksanian said earlier that the accusations are groundless because the leaked
audio contains only a short excerpt from Charchian’s comments made at the
meeting with the Izmirlian Medical Center staff. He said a longer recording
submitted by the defense lawyers to the court shows that the hospital chief
assured his staffers that he will not resort to “repression” against anyone
refusing to go to the polls.
Charchian, 61, was hospitalized and reportedly underwent surgery hours before
his arrest. He was taken to Yerevan’s Vartashen prison on July 3.
Hayastan, which finished second in the elections, says that the charges leveled
against Charchian are government retribution for his affiliation with the ruling
party’s main election challenger.
Supporters of the opposition bloc led by former President Robert Kocharian
rallied outside prosecutors’ headquarters in Yerevan on June 24 to demand his
release. Similar protests were also staged there by medics from the Izmirlian
Center and other hospitals.
Dozens of members and supporters of Hayastan and another major opposition bloc,
Paniv Unem, are now prosecuted for allegedly trying to bribe or bully voters.
Some of them are also held in detention.
No government loyalist is known to have been arrested on election-related
charges so far.
Both opposition blocs claim that public sector employees openly supporting them
were harassed and even fired by government officials in the run-up to or right
after the elections. They have also accused central and provincial government
bodies of forcing their employees to attend the ruling Civil Contract party’s
campaign rallies. The authorities deny these claims.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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