Will Hrayr Tovmasyan Be Arrested? Discussions Among Pashinyan and His Team

According to the newspaper "Zhoghovurd", the question of releasing the President of the Constitutional Court, Hrayr Tovmasyan, remains the number one agenda item for the authorities. According to information from "Zhoghovurd", a meeting of the ‘My Step’ faction of the National Assembly took place at the CPCK office the day before and lasted about 4 hours.

During this closed-door meeting, this question was one of the main topics. The newspaper reports that a final decision has been made during the discussions, assigning the responsibility to Vladimir Vardanyan, the head of the NA Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs, and Rustam Badasyan, the Minister of Justice of Armenia.

Initially, the members of ‘My Step’ were outraged that Hrayr Tovmasyan had “tailored” the Constitution years ago in a way that makes it impossible to dismiss the President of the Constitutional Court. The issue at hand is that, as a legal path, there is essentially only one option left— to arrest Hrayr Tovmasyan within the framework of a criminal case, after which it will be possible to dissolve the Constitutional Court and form a new composition.

But how will this process be organized? The law on the “Constitutional Court” clearly states that, first and foremost, if the court decides that the President of the Constitutional Court should be arrested, this permission must be granted by the Constitutional Court itself. Even if a judge decides to arrest Hrayr Tovmasyan, in that case, the powers of the President of the Constitutional Court will only be suspended until the court makes a final decision, during which neither the President of the Constitutional Court nor judges can be elected.

How the issue of Tovmasyan’s arrest will be resolved, the authorities are still unable to understand. The matter is also agenda-related in terms of reaching a settlement through constitutional amendments, but that entails a lengthy process, and the authorities do not want to wait that long.

For more details, refer to today’s newspaper issue.