ACCORDING TO KOCHARIAN, PACE’S MOST IMPORTANT PROPOSAL IS PROPOSAL TO RECOGNIZE CC DECISION
Noyan Tapan
March 20, 2008
YEREVAN, MARCH 20, NOYAN TAPAN. Not accepting the results of the
elections by a defeated candidate and his supporters is a matter of
political culture.
RA President Robert Kocharian said at the March 20 press conference. He
advised just to study the results of elections in European countries:
in many cases the number of votes of winning and defeated candidates
differ very little, nevertheless "no one makes this a tragedy," they
do not think that if, for instance, 49.5% thinks in a different way,
the state system, the Constitution should be changed, the parliament
should be dissolved. "It [Armenia] will never become a country,
if we think so," the RA President said.
R. Kocharian noted that in all elections there will be a great part
of people, which will not vote for the authorities. "Shall we make
it a flag for changing the state system: in 2003 Stepan Demirchian
received more votes than Levon Ter-Petrosian received this time,
were we to think of changing the state system?"
The RA President said that after each elections proposals to change
the Electoral Code are made: "I do not know what we should change: one
thing remains, which I fully support: that is the electoral commissions
should be formed, the elections should be organized by the state
and there should not be party commissions," he said emphasizing that
this proposal had been made by the experts of the Venice Commission,
but the representatives of the political field did not accept it.
Commenting upon the proposal voiced by John Prescott, the head of the
PACE monitoring mission, on releasing people, who have not committed
grave crimes together with accepting the CC decision in unreserved way
and holding reforms in media sphere, the RA President said that the
examination should be led up to the end and the use of punishment can
be mild or strict only at the court. "The legal proceedings should
have their legal process, I do not exclude use of the institution
of granting an amnesty, and the prosecutor can, for instance, demand
3 months’ suspended imprisonment instead of 5 years’ imprisonment,"
he said. Kocharian considers that his European colleagues also mean
the very variant. He said that the law enforcement bodies and the
authorities can be more flexible and are flexible: nearly 800 people
had been brought to the Police, but only nearly 100 out of them
were arrested. "There are misguided people, who themselves do not
understand what had happened to them. There is evidence, according to
which people were given tablets in the evening, it should be evaluated
with comprehension, and stricter attitude should be shown to the
organizers and provokers and not to the ordinary people," he said.
The RA President said that 40-50 cases will be sent to the court
in the coming month, the trials will be open and the public will be
informed without fail. "Today is can be unequivocally said that the
mass disorders were organized, started from building barricades up
to the actions of robbery, slaughter."
According to the RA President, the most important of PACE proposals
is the proposal on accepting the CC decision in inreserved way: the
possibility of using the other proposals and the circumstance of their
being realistic will proceed from it. "If they are accepted, it means
that the situation appears in another plane, and for everybody it will
be a serious sign that the situation has changed, which supposes use
of some mitigated approaches."