The signing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty initialed in Washington last August remains conditional on a change of Armenia’s constitution, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov reiterated on Thursday.
“Our expectation is that territorial claims against Azerbaijan will be removed from the Armenian constitution. After that, a peace agreement can be signed,” Azerbaijani news agencies quoted Bayramov as saying.
Azerbaijan specifically objects to a preamble to the current constitution referring to a 1990 Armenian declaration of independence, which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The only legal way to remove that reference is to adopt a new constitution through a referendum.
While rejecting the Azerbaijani precondition in public, Prime Minister Pashinian has repeatedly called for the kind of constitutional change that is demanded by Baku. Pashinian said on Thursday that he has a popular mandate to enact such a change after his Civil Contract party’s victory in last month’s parliamentary elections rejected as fraudulent by the Armenian opposition.
The current constitution also stipulates that the draft of a new constitution must be approved by at least two-thirds of the parliament deputies before being put on a referendum. Civil Contract fell short of such a majority in the June 7 elections.
Pashinian did not clarify just how he is planning to overcome this hurdle. He said only that the composition of Armenia’s new parliament does not allow the new constitution’s adoption “solely through intra-parliamentary mechanisms.”
“We need to analyze the situation and take a position on the issue,” he told journalists.
Some Armenian opposition figures and commentators have speculated that Pashinian could hold the referendum without the draft constitution’s mandatory parliamentary approval. In what they see as a related development, Civil Contract hastily pushed through the outgoing parliament earlier this week a bill that will effectively strip hundreds of thousands of Armenians living abroad of their voting rights.
Under Armenian law, a new constitution has to be backed by at least one-quarter of the country’s 2.5 million or so eligible voters. The total number of the voters should decrease considerably after the mass disenfranchisement of expats. The ruling party will thus need fewer votes to adopt the constitution that was drafted by the Armenian government early this year but has still not been made public.
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