From the human rights perspective, when arrestees sew their mouths, can it be considered as ordinary a phenomenon, as wearing earrings for women? In response to this question of www.aravot.am, Karen Andreasyan, the Human Rights Defender, said, “Any self-mutilation cannot be considered as normal or acceptable. I am convinced that the Minister of Justice cannot believe either that it is a healthy or acceptable or positive phenomenon. I don’t try to criticize him. I know one thing – for us, any sewn mouth, any sewn eye causes great alarm and our quick responses rush first of all to those very cases. And if we respond so quickly, it means that we think it is abnormal, we think it is an illegal, inhuman phenomenon. For us, any self-mutilation is so significant that our whole office is ready to go and meet with that man. It is almost what happens. There has been no case of self-mutilation that our workers were not aware of and didn’t rush to the correctional facility.”
We inquired what their workers said, whether it was correct that the holes in mouths were already there, they just get a thread through it and it was normal, Karen Andreasyan said, “We wouldn’t allow ourselves to comment on that, because we haven’t carried out a medical examination of those people whether it hurts or doesn’t hurt, how much they are physically harmed or spiritually humiliated during that process, because the phenomenon itself is important for us. If there is self-mutilation, it means there is a problem and this problem should be solved. Unfortunately, we are not always able to solve that problem, because it is beyond our competencies. But it is obvious that we see the problem and want to solve it.”
Hripsime JEBEJYAN
