New Circumstances in Criminal Case Involving Armenia’s Bodybuilding Champion Vahram Hakobyan
In past publications we have covered a criminal case that involves Armenia’s bodybuilding champion, participant and winner of international sport competitions Vahram Hakobyan, who claims the criminal case against him is fake and fabricated, which has created artificial obstacles for him that affected his sports career, and as a result of that he is unable to return to Armenia.
There are new circumstances that are potentially directly conncted with this criminal case, and those may rapidyly change the direction of this case. We have interviewed the sportsman’s lawyer Karen Stepanyan to learn more about these new circumstances and details related to this case.
In answer to our question in what phase the criminal case is now and how fair the accusations are, lawyer Stepanyan said: “Soon it will be one-and-half year since this criminal case is being investigated, and this case is still totally based exclusively on the claimant’s subjective opinion. The investigation department has given legal force to the claimant’s biased statements, and based on that it has built a criminal case that is totally fake. The National Security Service (NSS) has shown a particularly high interest to this case, and has not spared any efforts to give legitimacy to proofs obtained through illegal means. There are proven facts in this criminal case that the actions of the NSS were out of the law.”
– Please be more specific about the actions of the NSS.
– On April 20, 2019, at 10:00a.m. the General jurisdiction court of Yerevan, headed by judge R. Vardazaryan, approved a motion submitted by the NSS department of Ararat region to allow implemention of operative investigation activity for obtaining proofs through recording, which referred to testimony given by claimant Vaghinak Ghazaryan in the framework of this criminal case. It is worth mentioning that Vaghinak Ghazaryan gave his testimony at the NSS department of Ararat region on April 20, 2019, during the time interval of 10:15 a.m. and 11:55 a.m. On the same day, after applying to the NSS department of Ararat region, the latter also wrote a testimony consisting of four hard copy pages. However, as mentioned above, the court had already made a decision about that. These time conflicts have been proven and are clear as they were obtained through copies of documents relating to this criminal case. I have submitted a letter to the Prosecutor General and the Chief of Special investigation service informing about this crime. Based on this evidently illegal court decision supposedly an operative investigative action was implemented, and then it was put on the ground of that illegal accusation. The strange thing is that the Special investigation service considers this information as “not specific”.
– Does this mean that they implemented an operative activity and then after that put a document with prior date in the case? Does this mean the document that we are referring to that was put in this case and the case was built on is a “proof” obtained illegally, which is in contradiction with the constitution, and law-enforcement bodies and courts cannot use it?
– This is a clear and proven fact now. This is proven by court documents in the criminal case, which have been provided to me by the investigation department. Unfortunately, the investigative department and court did not pay attention to it due to reasons unknown to us. As a lawyer, I exclude the possibility that this difference of times might be a technical mistake because in case documents prepared on April 20, 2019, there are facts and circumstances that could not be known by anybody on that day.
– You are assuring that the case was from the very beginning biased, and continues to be such today too. Please elaborate more on where you see such biased approach, and why you believe the law-enforcement body is biased.
– I came to this conclusion after reading the entire package of documents of this criminal case. Specifically, an entire important institution of a region was put in service for the interests of the claimant, and this was done for the purpose of giving legitimacy to “proofs” obtained through illegal means, and the investigation department accepted the testimony of the claimant without questioning anything in it. In addition to that, when requesting copies of documents related to this case, I have met a number of obstacles, which I do not exclude that might be connected with the personality of the judge issuing the court order to implement an operative activity of recording – the judge who made that decision is R. Vardazaryan, who was the president of the first instance court of general jurisdiction, and now he is the president of the Highest court council. Back on May 11, I requested hard copies of that court session minutes, which has not been provided to me to this date. I had to apply to request copies again.
– According to you, what could be the interest of the NS Ararat regional department to get involved in this issue that has more of a social character and evidently does not contain any threats to national security, and why would they be interested to implement such a high level operative activity?
– I read news on media about recent arrest of NSS Ararat regional department chief A. Hovhannisyan, who was involved in corruption processes, and I think that it is possible that the circumstances I referred to above may have been a part of that chain of crimes because according to the criminal case, claimant Vaghinak Ghazaryan presents himself as a large businessman in the area of production and export of agricultural products, and he owns agricultural lands. Thus, I do not exclude a possibility that the NSS involvement was done to give a “favor” to him, the real reasons behind which should be discovered by law-enforcement bodies.
To note, in a news publication by “Radio Liberty” on June 24, entitled as “NSS Ararat Regional Department Chief Was Involved in Corruption Abuses, He Is Arrested: NSS”, the article referred to NSS official statement and mentioned that the latter was arrested for “abusing his official powers, which caused heavy consequences”. Specifically, according to official statement, the latter is accused in “Selling public property lands by the advice of public offiials in Ararat region that used to belong to the regional municipality, organizing fake auctions, causing significant damage to the community, and hiding facts of crime by public officials.”
According to Vahram Hakobyan’s lawer Karen Stepanyan, during one of court sessions he asked Vaghinak Ghazaryan if he knows the mentioned high ranking official of the National Security Service, to which he answered positively. In addition to this, in an interview taken from Vahram Hakobyan and published by 168 Hours on April 23 when the new circumstances referred to above did not exist yet, entitled as “Criminal Case Involving Famous Sportsman is Still Being Delayed, Causing Permanent Damage to His Sports Career”, Vahram Hakobyan said that Vaghinak Ghazaryan had bragged about his connections with high ranking officials and said that “he is rich and will spend as much as needed to send Vahram behind bars”. During a recent court session intermission we approached Vaghinak Ghazaryan to ask whether he is an associated person with the arrested high ranking NSS official, whether he, being a large businessman in the sector of agriculture and land owner, has had any relationship with the mentioned NSS high ranking official in the process of obtaining his lands, and whether the regional NSS department was put in service for his purposes as a “favor” due to that relationship, to which he refused to answer even without listening to the questions till the end. Instead, his lawyer politely said: “At this point we do not want to express an opinion”. Perhaps these questions will be answered by NSS after the termination of the ongoing investigation, and we will monitor future official statements, and if there is any official statement about this by NSS, we will publish.
By the way, we also tried to ask for a second opinion and interviewed a lawyer specialized in international protection of human rights, who is Vahram Hakobyan’s supporter but did not want her name to be published. The human rights law expert believes that the information and materials in the criminal case obtained through external monitoring and recording illegally cannot be used by investigation and court, neither can any conclusions stemming from thereof: this principle in law is more known as “the fruit of poisonous tree”. Specifically, even the Armenian Constitution has a provision about that: “ The use of evidence obtained in violation of basic rights or that undermining the right to fair trial shall be prohibited.” According to her, if Vahram Hakobyan is not justified in Armenia and the case is not dismissed by the court, she will strongly recommend Vahram Hakobyan and will support him to take the case to the European Court of Human Rights, and believes that a criminal case with structure like this one has a huge opportunity to win there.
Prepared by Kamo Mailyan
