Human rights vain topic in Armenia - debate

An Armenian human rights activist said Thursday that he doesn’t see any sense in discussing the human rights situation in the country, the topic having exhausted itself long ago.

“The mere hope that anything will change has vanished; people are driven to despair, pushed to revenge instead of chossing lawful methods,” Artur Sakunts, the chairman of the Helskinki Citizens’ Assembly’s Vanadzor Office, told a debate devoted to the 2013 human rights situation in Armenia.

As a notable example of despair, he referred the rebellious protests by Shant Harutyunyan, the leader of the nationalist Tseghakron (Race Religion) party and 13 supporters who were jailed in November in the wake of what they called attempts to stage a coup in Armenia. The activist said he thinks that they added to the team of “political prisoners” in Armenia.

“What we need to speak of is cynicism, not an absence of a political will by [President] Serzh Sargsyan and his supporters,” he noted.

Sakunts said the high-profile criminal case, which saw the son of Surik Khachatryan, the former governor of Syunik, released from jail and Colonel Artak Budaghyan face a prosecution over the scandalous murder of a former mayoral candidate in August, is a striking example of such cynicism.

“And it’s a vivid fact that after all this, the Defense Ministry’s ‘patriotic generals’ keep silent,” he added.

Zhanna Alexanyan, the president of a local human rights NGO also attending the news conference, addressed the deadly incidents in Armenian army, noting that courts and inquest bodies often exercise pressure against witnesses at subsequent legal proceeding.

“Witnesses are kept in the Military Police for months during the inquest. And after a witness admits to being subjected to pressure, he or she may face threats by the prosecutor just in court,” she said.

The Helsinki Committee of Armenia’s president, Avetik Ishkhanyan, said for his part that the human rights reports on Armenia do not reflect an essential progress from one year to another.

“The clear instruction is that a political will is necessary to solve the problems,” he said, blaming the existing situation on the political system.

Ishkhanyan said a major contributing fact is Armenia’s Constitution which has secured what he called an angel’s hypothesis for the president and government officials.


Ashot Melikyan, President of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, spoke of increased pressures against journalists, attributing them to the two major elections held earlier this year (the February 18 presidential poll and the May 5 mayoral election in Yerevan).

He said the political atmosphere becomes tenser during elections, with “journalists and media outlets facing tougher attacks”.


“It is worth mentioning that we have a thick mass lickspittles in Armenia, who secure the victory of the ruling party or its candidate. So they struggle with one another to see who will secure more votes, as well as exert pressure on more journalists,” he said.


Melikyan refrained from mentioning figures, saying that their organization is still summing up its report. But he said that that the violations observed in the first nine month of this year outnumber the cases recorded in 2012.