Author: Antranik Varosian

                                        Monday, 
Armenia, China Sign Visa Waiver Deal
Armenia -- Foreign Ministers Zohrab Mnatsakanian (R) of Armenia and Wang Yi of 
China sign a visa waiver agreement in Yerevan, .
The foreign ministers of Armenia and China signed an agreement on visa-free 
travel between their countries after holding talks in Yerevan on Sunday.
The agreement will allow Armenian and Chinese citizens to visit and stay in 
each other’s country visa-free for up to 90 days.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian stressed the importance of the deal when he met 
with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi later in day. He said it will spur 
people-to-people and commercial contacts between the two nations.
Pashinian also noted his May 14-15 visit to Beijing during which met with 
China’s President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Keqiang. “I am glad that as a 
result of our discussions we reached concrete agreements on developing mutually 
beneficial cooperation,” he said, according to his press office.
“We are prepared for and intent on deepening mutually beneficial cooperation 
with Armenia,” Wang said for his part.
Official Armenian statements on the talks suggest that Wang’s meetings with 
Pashinian and Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanian focused on ways of boosting 
Chinese-Armenian economic ties. They specifically discussed Chinese involvement 
in infrastructure implemented in Armenia.
China is already Armenia’s second largest trading partner. According to 
official Armenian statistics, Chinese-Armenian trade soared by over 29 percent 
in 2018, to $771 million.
Regional security was also on the agenda of Wang’s talks in Yerevan, with 
Pashinian praising China’s “balanced” position on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.
Scrutiny Of Armenian Judge ‘May Be Political’
        • Ruzanna Stepanian
Armenia - Smbat Gogian, chairman of the Supreme Qualification Committee, talks 
to journalists, Yerevan, .
The doctoral dissertation of an Armenian judge, who freed former President 
Robert Kocharian from custody last August, may have come under scrutiny for 
political reasons, a senior government official said on Monday.
The Court of Appeals judge, Aleksandr Azarian, overturned a lower court’s 
decision to allow investigators to arrest Kocharian on charges stemming from 
the 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan. He ruled at the time that the 
Armenian constitution gives the ex-president immunity from prosecution.
The higher Court of Cassation subsequently struck down Azarian’s ruling, paving 
the way for Kocharian’s renewed arrest in December. Kocharian was again freed 
on May 18 pending the outcome of his trial which began on May 13.
The decision made by a district court judge presiding over the trial angered 
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his political allies and supporters. 
Pashinian demanded on May 20 a mandatory “vetting” of all Armenian judges, 
saying that many of them remain linked to “the former corrupt system.”
A few days after Kocharian’s latest release, Smbat Gogian, the head of 
Armenia’s Supreme Qualification Committee, a state body overseeing the granting 
of postgraduate degrees, claimed that Azarian plagiarized some parts of his 
doctoral thesis.
The allegation, strongly denied by the senior judge, led an Armenian parliament 
committee on science and education to hold on Monday an extraordinary session 
on “possible legislative solutions for the fight against plagiarism.” Gogian 
also attended the meeting.
Gogian stood by the plagiarism claim when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian 
service. He said his agency arrived at such a conclusion after being alerted by 
an individual whom he refused to name.
“By comparing files with each other, our [verification] system showed that 
[Azarian’s] dissertation has textual matches with two other dissertations,” 
added Gogian. One of those dissertations was written by Vazgen Rshtuni, the 
chairman of the Court of Appeals.
Asked whether political motives are behind the scandal, the official said: 
“Maybe they are … But I insist that the Supreme Qualification Committee did not 
initiate it.”
Azarian charged, meanwhile, that the plagiarism allegations as well as the 
parliamentary discussion organized by pro-government lawmakers are part of a 
coordinated smear campaign targeting him. “I think it’s clear to everyone that 
all bodies have been explicitly instructed to campaign against me,” the judge 
told News.am.
Azarian also said that he and Rshtuni were supervised by the same legal scholar 
when they worked on their dissertations. This why, he claimed, the two texts 
may have the same passages.
Ex-President’s Indicted Brother Again Allowed To Leave Armenia
        • Naira Bulghadarian
Armenia -- Aleksandr Sarkisian is taken in for questioning by the National 
Security Service, Yerevan, July 4, 2018.
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) has again allowed an indicted brother 
of Armenia’s former President Serzh Sarkisian to temporarily leave the country.
An NSS spokesman, Samson Galstian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service on Monday 
that Aleksandr Sarkisian needs to undergo medical treatment abroad. He would 
not say in which country Sarkisian will receive it and for how long.
Sarkisian was already allowed by the NSS to travel to Europe in March. 
Investigators told him to return to Armenia in late April for further 
questioning.
The NSS charged Sarkisian with fraud in February several months after freezing 
his $30 million Armenian bank account as part of a separate inquiry. It 
announced shortly afterwards that he has donated $19.6 million from that 
account to the Armenian military. It said the state will also receive the rest 
of the sum in payment of Sarkisian’s back taxes.
The fraud charges stem from over a dozen drawings by the 20th century Armenian 
painter Martiros Saryan which were found in Aleksandr Sarkisian’s Yerevan villa 
in July. The NSS said his fugitive son Narek had fraudulently obtained them 
from Saryan’s descendants.
Narek Sarkisian, 37, fled Armenia in June 2018 before being charged with 
illegal arms possession and drug trafficking. The Czech police detained him in 
Prague in December on an Armenian arrest warrant. Armenian prosecutors have 
since been seeking his extradition.
Aleksandr Sarkisian’s second son, Levon, is currently standing trial on charges 
of attempted murder and illegal arms possession which he strongly denies. The 
33-year-old was arrested in July and freed on bail in September.
Sarkisian, 62, is thought to have made a big fortune in the past two decades. 
He held a seat in the Armenian parliament from 2003-2011.
Armenian, Azeri FMs To Meet Again
        • Susan Badalian
        • Aza Babayan
U.S. - Foreign Ministers Elmar Mammadyarov (R) of Azerbaijan and Zohrab 
Mnatsakanian (second from right) of Armenia pose for a photograph with the OSCE 
Minsk Group co-chairs in New York, 26 September 2018.
The foreign ministers of Armenia and Azerbaijan will meet again soon for 
further talks on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, the Armenian Foreign Ministry 
said on Monday.
The ministry spokeswoman, Anna Naghdalian, said Foreign Minister Zohrab 
Mnatsakanian and U.S., Russian and French mediators discussed in Yerevan 
preparations his “upcoming” talks with his Azerbaijani counterpart Elmar 
Mammadyarov.
The three mediators co-chairing the OSCE Minsk Group visited the Armenian 
capital at the start of a fresh tour of the Karabakh conflict zone. They met 
with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian later in the day.
Naghdalian gave no date of Mnatsakanian’s planned talks with Mammadyarov.
The top Armenian and Azerbaijani diplomats most recently met in Moscow on April 
15 in the presence of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. A joint statement 
released by the three ministers said the warring sides reaffirmed their stated 
intention to strengthen the ceasefire regime around Karabakh and along the 
Armenian-Azerbaijani border and to take other take confidence-building measures.
Pashinian and Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev briefly spoke with each other 
when they visited Brussels on May 13. It was Pashinian’s and Aliyev’s fifth 
face-to-face contact in about eight months. Their first meeting held in 
Tajikistan in September was followed by a significant decrease in ceasefire 
violations on the frontlines.
In an interview with the Russian daily “Kommersant” published on Monday, 
Mammadyarov sounded cautiously optimistic about further Armenian-Azerbaijani 
peace talks. He said Baku last year give Armenia’s new leadership time to 
“familiarize itself with details of the negotiation process.”
“That transitional phase ended, and negotiations resumed at the level of both 
the leaders of the two countries and the foreign ministers … The dialogue is 
going on in the existing format and under a particular agenda, which gives rise 
to certain optimism,” he said.
Mammadyarov also stressed that confidence-building measures by the two sides 
must go hand in hand with “real steps in the negotiation process” and 
“elimination of severe consequences” of the conflict. That first and foremost 
means a “withdrawal of occupation forces from Azerbaijan’s territories,” he 
said.
Reprinted on ANN/Armenian News with permission from RFE/RL
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