Ashot Melikyan, the head of the Freedom of Speech Defense Committee, made a comment for Aravot.am on yesterday’s ruling of the Constitutional Court concerning Human Rights Defender Karen Andreasyan’s petition, “I, to be frank, expected a different ruling. The Constitutional Court could have suspended the enforcement of the articles on libel and offense, till the parliament made appropriate amendments, work was done with courts and judges, in order that they were ready to implement those. Article 34 enables that, but unfortunately, the court did not use that.”
According to Ashot Melikyan, Article 1087.1 of the Civil Code really wasn’t unconstitutional, “As early as when the Ombudsman filed in the Constitutional Court I said that there is no issue of finding it unconstitutional – it is a different matter that this article should be fundamentally amended, its clauses should be clarified and most importantly the upper margin of compensation should be lowered.”
The ruling of the Constitutional Court is rather a guide for the courts and in Mr. Melikyan’s opinion, if our courts take that into consideration, the situation may change, “I just greatly doubt that the courts are able to be flexible and immediately react to that all. One should file in the National Court and have the article amended very quickly, but under these conditions when all political forces are preparing for the election, I don’t know whether there is a possibility for doing that.”
In response to my question perhaps one should have seized the opportunity of pre-election period when the mass media were a powerful tool and quickly have the article amended, Mr. Melikyan said, “The situation is so tense, so alarming that if we judged all this soberly, even the pre-election period should not impede all this, given all this the MPs should pay attention to that and fuel it.”
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Hripsime JEBEJYAN
