Yesterday the Court of Appeals of the Republic of Armenia denied the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor (HCAV) Office’s appeal of a trial court’s decision in favor of Chief of Police Vova Gasparyan. Artur Sakunts, the manager of the HCAV, demanded that V. Gasparyan deny the statements besmirching the organization’s reputation. Sakunts demanded that the Chief of Police pay 10 AMD as symbolic compensation.
Let us remind that the grounds for the organization’s petition were Vladimir Gasparyan’s interviews given to www.hraparak.am website on October 17, 2011, and to the Military Forces program on October 15, 2011.
The Chief of Police stated talking about the activities of the Helsinki organization, “20-year-old ponytailed brats whom the Helsinki organizations have brought and those brats’ mouths give personal offense. When a brat offends a person who defended the country and suffered for that country, I will not tolerate that… They curse the Minister of Defense calling him ‘that one-legged guy.’ I say that our one-legged guy does more than four-legged people like you, what that person did, I don’t defend, he did for this country and thus lost that leg.”
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Artur Sakunts made the following assessment of the appeal’s denial during a conversation with www.aravot.am, “The justice in the Republic of Armenia manifested itself with this decision once again. And that manifestation is that when a case is considered, in which one of the parties is an official and the other is a citizen, the justice is in the interest of that official. Regardless of obvious facts and proofs, the Court of Appeals didn’t accept those facts, didn’t make an assessment and didn’t take into account. If it didn’t have a clear position on
the business reputation of an NGO, it could have taken a recess and filed a motion in the Constitutional Court and contributed to administering justice. However, it didn’t do that and we basically witnessed that justice in court served the interests of the executive power’s representatives once again.”
The manager of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor Office is going to appeal to the Supreme Court and raise the issue in the Constitutional Court.
In response to our question whether what had happened didn’t testify to the fact that appealing was an end in itself, A. Sakunts said, “Certainly, no. We see the nature of the judicial power, what responsibility officials bear for their assessments of civil initiatives, NGOs. The trial also showed that officials can take an irresponsible attitude in their public statements. It was one matter that it could be discussed separately and it is a different matter that he says in court that he didn’t mean anyone, whereas it is obvious that he meant concrete people.”
According to Sakunts, the appeal will contribute to justice’s maturity and clarification of many legal issues.
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
