A Petition has Started Demanding the Immediate Release of Ara Saghatelyan from Detention

Constitutional expert Gohar Meloyan has released a statement on her Facebook page, indicating that a petition has begun for the immediate release of Ara Saghatelyan.

“Dear compatriots, we invite you to participate in the petition demanding the immediate release of political prisoner Ara Saghatelyan from illegal detention. On February 19, this year, Ara Saghatelyan, the president and co-founder of the 'International Center for the Development of Parliamentarism', was unlawfully arrested and subsequently detained.

The factual basis of the charges brought against him, as well as their legal qualification, are absurd and fail to withstand any criticism. This has been substantiated by respected representatives from both the legal community and the field of information technology. According to the National Security Service's press release, Ara Saghatelyan is accused of being connected with a fake Facebook account, based solely on the fact that in mid-February 2021, he accessed the same IP address of a VPN application that had been connected to a famous user's Facebook account in mid-October 2020.

Moreover, during that same time period, dozens of people besides Ara Saghatelyan from Armenia connected to the aforementioned IP address. The selection of Ara Saghatelyan from this list and his detention highlights the evidently biased and subjective nature of the ongoing process and the goal of political persecution.

Equally laughable is the legal aspect of the charges. Specifically, the charges have been filed under three articles of the RA Criminal Code: - Article 226, which raises national, racial, or religious hatred; - Article 226.2, concerning public calls for violence; - Article 307.4, which breaches the rules on the publication or dissemination of information during a state of war.

However, the RA Criminal Code imposes an imperative prohibition on prosecuting an individual under the articles 226 and 226.2 for the same action. Particularly, Article 226.2 states that an act can only be qualified under this article if the characteristics of Article 226 are absent. As for Article 307.4, the Constitutional Court has suspended the operation of the rules prohibiting the dissemination of information during a state of war. In other words, by decision of the Constitutional Court, those norms have temporarily ceased to be part of the RA legal system. Therefore, no individual may be held liable or prosecuted for the alleged violation of those norms.

Thus, the legal aspect of the charges is absurd and once again confirms the political nature of the persecution against Ara Saghatelyan. Furthermore, the NSS has decided to restrict Ara Saghatelyan’s rights to have visits, extending this restriction to his family, including a minor child, without providing any justification for this decision.

Summarizing the above and considering the definition of “political prisoner” enshrined in the 1900 resolution of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, we note that Ara Saghatelyan is the first political prisoner of post-war Armenia.