“If it were not the activeness of the movement, if there were not an army of complaining citizens, I am sure the Constitutional Court’s decision would have another content”, said ANC member and economist Vahagn Khachatryan, in the conversation with Aravot.am, referring to the CC’s decision on “Funded Pensions”. Recall that the Constitutional Court decided that the disputable provisions of the law are anti-constitutional. As said by Mr. Khachatryan, the authors of the law were also confident that they are breaching the Constitution. “It is not that they were unaware, introducing the factor of mandatory is already a norm contrary to the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia. Simply, since all of these were very organized and the representatives of 4 factions of the National Assembly were found principled, in fact the ruling Republican party failed to appreciate this force on this issue, all of this could have been get done at the National Assembly. And as it did not happen, all organized events that took place in the last 4 months were coming from the authorities, and it gave rise for the Constitutional Court to think that really there are be outrageous facts in the law, and they made such a decision.” Vahagn Khachatryan also noted that although the Constitutional Court has adopted two important provision as anti-constitutional, however, to finally rejoice and give a score to the Constitutional Court’s decision, we need to be completely familiar with it. “Even today, as a result, we can evaluate the single important factor: the issue related to the property and the issue of violating people’s revenues. The Constitutional Court recorded these two and considered them as violations in the mandatory funded pension system. These are the most important ones,” said ANC member. Mr. Khachatryan also made a remarkable observation, and assured that in a number of RA laws and government decisions there are definitely anti-constitutional elements. “For example, the sale of Vorotan HPP, or “ARG” agreement, they were also anti-constitutional. It turns out that what the government decides should be introduced to the Constitutional Court.” Today, the Government responding the Constitutional Court’s decision announced: the Government will push this radical reform aimed at improving the welfare of the people within its proper constitutional formulations. The government will adopt the future action plan after receiving the decision of the Constitutional Court. In this respect, Mr. Khachatryan said, “The Government is in its role, instead of admitting that in the result of its anti-constitutional activities, an impulsion was applied over 160 thousand people, at the same time apologize to everyone against whom it applied impulsion, in addition, it should compensate for the losses. If it were otherwise, they would have punished the citizen: fines and penalty, court and so on. In addition, the system neither economically nor legally will give any result to the citizen pertaining to the improvement of his standards of living or life.” To our observation of given that the government has spent huge amounts of money to introduce this system, moreover, it has calculated that after the complete introduction of the system, millions will continue coming into the economy, hence, being reluctant to abandon the system and the millions, the government intends to make the funded payments into a new tax, at least this is a lot talked about recently, Mr. Khachatryan said, “This government headed by Tigran Sargsyan, and, generally, this authorities, to prove that they can do everything and they are correct, may also think of something stupid and introduce a new tax. With regard to the new tax, it says that it will harm the business, and will be a burden, and so on. Actually, the grounds that they had spent huge amounts of money, they are saying that they had spent 8 years on the system, they had introduced the best option, now it turns out that this best has anti-constitutional provisions, moreover, too many. Making it a tax will really destroy the economy.” Mr. Khachatryan also noticed that during the CC discussions, the President of the Court raised a very important issue: the amendment of the tax on social security introduced since last year, which is also anti-constitutional. “In other words, the social state, which is enshrined in our state, the role of the employer in the concept of social state was reduced, before that the social tax was paid by the employer, after introducing the income tax, the employer bears no obligation over the employee and the state, this is also anti-constitutional. I can understand this context. In any case, the Constitutional Court’s decisions are always two sided: they are trying to satisfy both sides. Of course, if the authorities are in a pretty bad shape. But, most importantly, violation of property and human rights has occurred.”
Nelly Babayan
