Armenian Constitutional Court participated in the process of change of power
Read on the website Vestnik KavkazaThe 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.