ARMENIAN CONSTITUTIONAL COURT PARTICIPATED IN THE PROCESS OF CHANGE OF POWER
Author: Susanna Petrosyan
Vestnik Kavkaza
June 6 2012
Russia
The Constitutional Court of Armenia rejected the claim of the
opposition organization, the Armenian National Congress, to find the
results of the parliamentary elections of the 6th of May invalid.
The court decided to uphold the CEC decision dated 13.05.2012 about
using the system of proportional representation in parliamentary
elections. According to the second part of Article 102 of the
Constitution, this decision is final and it will take effect after
promulgation.
The representative of the ANC in the court, lawyer Vahe Grigoryan,
declared that he was going to appeal against the decision of the court
to the European Court of Human Rights. Violations of the European
Convention on Human Rights will be the reason for the appeal.
It is important to note that the ANC electoral bloc of the opposition
made a claim to the Constitutional Court to find invalid the results
of the elections of the 6th of May in which the system of proportional
representation was used. Amongst the grounds of the ANC presented
to the court there are vote-rigging and the disappearance of ink of
special stamps from voters’ passports, which became the reason for
organizing a new vote.
The action of the ANC says that there were numerous violations of the
Constitution and the country’s legislation in the electoral process,
the state didn’t meet the condition to prevent the possibility of
double voting, and the results of the elections don’t reflect the will
of the electorate. The claimant accused the CEC of absence of control
over compliance with the Constitution and providing equally competitive
conditions for all the political forces. In order to establish these
claims, the representative of the ANC, Vahe Grigoryan, mentioned
the active participation of President Serge Sargsyan, Prime Minister
Tigran Sargsyan and other officials who represented no less than 36%
of the proportional voting list of the ruling Republican Party of
Armenia in the electoral campaign and simultaneously performed their
official duties.
The defendant, the CEC secretary Armen Smbatyan, noted in his turn that
the declarations of the claimant about violations of the electoral
code aren’t based on facts: “On the basis of the examples given by
the ANC it is impossible to invalidate the election results, even at
only one of the polling stations.
The CEC chairman, Tigran Mukuchyan, drew attention to the fact
that neither local electoral commissions nor the CEC registered any
precedents of double voting. “The declarations concerning crowds of
voters in the morning are nothing more than assumptions; naturally,
they lack any legal base,” the CEC chairman declared.
As for the ANC’s claims against the participation of the president and
other officials in the electoral campaign of the RPA, Mukuchyan said
that this fact couldn’t be estimated as a violation of Article 2 of
the Constitution. Concerning the quick disappearance of the ink of
the stamps, according to Mukuchyan, “this fact couldn’t affect the
results of the vote, because it was just an additional instrument
for preventing double voting”.
The basis of the court’s decision is the idea that there were no
complaints from the claimant before the elections and no further
claim to the Administrative Court. The Constitutional Court Chairman,
Gagik Aroutunian, noted that the court follows the decisions of the
Administrative Court dealing with controversial issues concerning the
electoral process. It means that the court will take the falsifications
into consideration only if they are registered by the Administrative
Court. Replying to this declaration the ANC coordinator, Levon
Zurabyan, expressed the idea that the system of falsifying election
results operates in Armenia at a national level: electoral commissions
falsify the results, and the courts don’t notice the falsifications.
The Constitutional Court emphasized the lack of grounds of the
examples of falsifications given by the ANC. Maybe that’s true, but
the attitude of the court to this claim recalls its attitude to the
claims of the opposition candidates at the elections of 2003 and 2008,
Stepan Demirchyan and Levon Ter-Petrosyan, respectively. After the
court’s decision, several representatives of the ANC declared that
this decision was quite predictable and nobody was surprised by it.
However, as for the Constitutional Court, there are two main trends
in its activity which cause concern.
It is important to pay the attention to the fact that the deplorable
tradition of ignoring Constitutional Court decisions characterizes
Armenian political life. In 1996, when the court replied to the
petition of the opposition litigating against the results of the
presidential elections, it examined all the materials presented and
appealed to the Attorney General’s Office with a claim to punish
the lawbreakers at 30 polling stations. However, this claim of the
court wasn’t answered. The decision of the court in April 2003, when
the court validated the decision of the CEC about the results of the
presidential elections but took into consideration mass protests and
proposed holding a referendum of confidence within a year, was also
ignored. At that time the officials made a declaration that there was
a political implication in that proposal and that it is incompatible
with the legal logic of the Constitutional Court’s decision concerning
the election results. Neither of the decisions of the court were
executed. Meanwhile, the Constitutional Court didn’t undertake any
measures in order to execute them.
As for the issue of 2008, one of the materials published by
WikiLeaks and containing information about the correspondence of
American diplomatic officials accredited in Armenia, informs about
the pressure brought on the Constitutional Court’s representatives
by the authorities during the consideration of the claim of Levon
Ter-Petrosyan, the leader of the united opposition, to find the
election results invalid. Hereafter this information wasn’t repudiated.
The second disturbing trend is the actual participation of the judicial
system, including the Constitutional Court, in the formation of the
other branches of power. This cycle is effected according to the
following scheme: the executive branch uses its administrative and
other resources and forms the legislative branch it needs. Afterwards,
this legislative system forms or rather reproduces the executive one,
meeting its constitutional commitments. The latter is known to play an
important role in the CEC designation. The executive branch and the
legislative branch in their turn form the judiciary. This branch of
power, together with the legislative one, provides all the legislative
and legal conditions for the re-election of the President. It turns
out that nowadays in Armenia there is a definite scheme of change of
power, which operates according to its own logic, presupposing the
negligibility of the population’s role. According to Vahe Grigoryan,
the cycle of change of power doesn’t concern people who haven’t got
any possibility of participating in this change.
The opposition is apparently struggling to restore the crucial role
of the people in this cycle, though this struggle is useless so far.