At the end of the siege of police headquarters in Yerevan, OSCE Representative on Freedom of the Media Dunja Mijatović today sought reassurance from the foreign minister of Armenia that journalists’ rights and safety during times of civil unrest would be protected.
The EU Eastern Partnership Civil Society Forum member Hovsep Khurshudyan, president of the “National Civic Initiative” NGO David Sanasaryan and “New Armenia” Front member Andreas Ghukasyan have been detained.
“Armenia’s investigation of the police assaults on demonstrators on July 29 should be swift and thorough,” said Giorgi Gogia, South Caucasus director at Human Rights Watch. “While the police have an obligation to maintain public order, they do not have carte blanche to use violence against people gathered to peacefully express their views.”
Accusation has been brought against Davit Sanasaryan, press speaker of “Heritage” party, member of the Council of Elders. Robert Revazyan, his attorney, told 168.am that he has been arrested in suspicion of organizing mass disturbances, according to Article 225, Point 1 of the Criminal Code. Davit Sanasaryan doesn’t accept the charges against him. A motion has been submitted to the Court of First Instance of Arabkir and Kanaker-Zeytun administrative districts on choosing detention as a means of restraint.
“I thank our journalists and reporters for their dedicated work and for working for a bloodless resolution of the situation. I also apologize to the journalists for the events which took on the night of July 30; during these events it was our greatest blunder. Certainly, conclusions will be made. I ask for our indulgence, I ask journalists but not the low enforcement personnel to forget about these events, because I am confident that it will never happen again. I also want these events to have no event subconsciously an impact on the freedom of your work.”
“Yerevan is neither Beirut nor Aleppo. Let no one aspire to import Near East solutions of the previous century, of the Cold War to Armenia. Let those who don’t comprehend this need to look at the history of Lebanon’s civil war or at the consequences of the civil war going on the moment in Syria and draw conclusions.”
“On August 1, 2016 the Investigation Department of the National Security Service has submitted a written request to the Armenian Prosecutor General’s Office to transfer the above-mentioned criminal case to another investigation body in accordance with the rules of the investigation set by the Article 190 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Armenia,” the NSS’s statement says.
The Human Rights Defender’s representatives are conducting visits to the Detention centers of the Police to see Varuzhan Avetisyan, Arayik Khandoyan, Artur Soghomonyan, Garnik Hovakimyan and other detainees, to get acquinated with the conditions of their detention, as well as to observe the provision of rights.
“The term ‘terrorist’ hasn’t been used for this period. Yet two days ago those operations weren’t even named terrorist corpus delicti, and it’s so, if the operations are directed against the population, civil persons. However, if NSS uses such a term, they have facts that those operations were directed not only against the authorities, the policemen, but against civil persons as well. Use of these terms shows that they intend to apply Article 217, maybe not towards all the members of the group.”
