The real purpose of making the Human Rights Defender of Armenia financially dependent

During today’s session, the Armenian government approved an amendment to the Constitutional Law on the Human Rights Defender by which the proposed amount in the budget for the Office of the Human Rights Defender will depend on the discretion of the government from now on.

This was the seventeenth item on the government’s agenda; it was included and accepted as an item for which there would be no report and on which there would be no discussion, meaning that it would be discussed covertly, with the principled objections of the Human Rights Defender.

Based on the agenda, it appears that these amendments were introduced by Minister of Finance Atom Janjughazyan.
According to the existing law, every year, the amount of funding for the institution of the Human Rights Defender under the state budget may not be less than the amount for allocation envisaged by the state budget of the previous year.

By the amendment proposed by the government, there will not be a guarantee anymore, and it turns out that the budget for next year may be cut with any justification and as a result of arbitrariness of anyone. For instance, Nikol Pashinyan or Atom Janjughazyan might not like a particular statement or report of the Human Rights Defender and might decide to punish the institution of the Human Rights Defender by cutting funding.

These amendments directly hinder the activities of the Human Rights Defender because, as a result, there may be cuts in the Office of the Human Rights Defender, including the number of employees, the number of visits to different institutions, provinces and border zones, the number of appeals to be considered, and there might not be an opportunity for rapid response and the obtainment of technical equipment, etc.

The government stated the following as rationale: “The government will adopt an approach that will help it pursue, in an unbiased manner, the addressability and efficiency of every fund that is spent on the state apparatus. The logical “function-authority-responsibility-result-evaluation” chain will be clearly enshrined in the public administration system, and the principle of universal, standardized, objective approaches and cost-efficient solutions will be specific for the administration system.”

For some reason, the authors of this ridiculous rationale believe that the tremendous surcharges that are given to the deputies of the National Assembly (who are like the ‘backpack’ of Nikol Pashinyan) for doing nothing and only fulfilling the will of Nikol Pashinyan by pressing buttons to vote for bills, are more targeted than, say, funding for the Office of the Human Rights Defender.

The Office of the Human Rights Defender works 24/7, and the sole purpose of putting this institution in this situation is political. Seeing that they are unable to restrict the activities of Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan in any way (in spite of efforts and attacks of fakes) and that Arman Tatoyan is using his full potential to keep the institution (the only operating one at the moment) of the Republic of Armenia viable, the authorities have now decided to “impoverish” the Human Rights Defender, meaning that if there is no funding, there is no opportunity to carry out activities in full.

Let us remind that earlier, the Government also took three cars belonging to the Office of the Human Rights Defender and justified this by “the urgent need to engage funds and make capital injections in the economy in order to solve the socio-economic issues having emerged in the Republic of Armenia as a result of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and war in 2020”.

By taking this action to make the Human Rights Defender financially dependent on the government, the latter is being straightforward with Arman Tatoyan and telling him to be on good terms with the ruling party, the finance minister and other stooges of the government in order to receive funding.

The indicator and evaluation of the work of the Human Rights Defender of the Republic of Armenia are the backlash of the Azerbaijani authorities at Arman Tatoyan because the hostile country can’t praise him, and if the public and political figures of varying calibers of the hostile country criticize him day and night, it means he is doing everything right.