Ani Samsonyan Appeals to Minister of Defense for Social Guarantees for Missing Contract Soldiers

I have addressed the Minister of Defense of Armenia with a letter to ensure social guarantees for missing contract soldiers. Ani Samsonyan, a deputy of the 'Enlightened Armenia' faction in the National Assembly, announced this on her Facebook page.

“Since September 27, 2020, until November 10, as a result of the large-scale war initiated by Azerbaijan against Artsakh, there are currently more than a dozen contract soldiers considered missing, whose family members are in a dire social situation, especially when the sole breadwinner has been the contract soldier. Complaints have been received that these contract soldiers have been dismissed from military service and have not been paid their salaries.

We note that due to the policies conducted by the Azerbaijani military-political leadership, there are no clear data regarding Armenian prisoners of war in Azerbaijan, and we cannot deny the possibility that the missing contract soldiers may also currently be in the status of a prisoner of war or hidden in the territories that have been handed over to Azerbaijan.

Regarding the issue of their dismissal from military service, there are clear legislative regulations. Specifically, according to Article 54, Clause 11 of the Law on Military Service and the Status of Servicemen of the Republic of Armenia, the grounds for dismissing a contract soldier from military service are death (decease) or being declared absent without leave or dead by judicial order.

According to Article 44 of the Civil Code of the Republic of Armenia: 1. At the request of interested parties, the court can declare a citizen as absent without leave if information about their whereabouts has not been received for a year from their place of residence. 2. The beginning of the calculation of the deadline for declaring someone absent without leave is considered to be the first day of the month following the month when the last information about the absentee was received, and if it is impossible to determine that month, then it is the first of January of the following year.

Thus, we state that soldiers missing during (or as a result of) military operations can only be recognized as absent without leave by a lawful court ruling if there is no information about their place of residence within a year. Based on the above, I request to reconsider the approach of hastily dismissing soldiers or, if possible, create mechanisms aimed at ensuring social guarantees for soldiers missing during (or as a result of) military operations and their family members,” wrote Samsonyan.