“I have participated in the monitoring of the contest for the candidate for ECHR judge, starting from the phase of submission of the documents up to the interview stage and final results. The completion passed by gross violations and transparency was not provided just from the beginning”, such opinion was expressed by member of “Europe in Law Association” NGO, also lawyer Mushegh Shushanyan, in the conversation with Aravot.am.
Note that according to the decree of President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan as of January 12, the decree dated 13 October 2014 on “Approving the List of Winners of the Contest for Selection of Candidates Nominated by the Republic of Armenia for the Post of Judge at the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)” has been invalidated. “ELA” representative Tigran Yegoryan expressed an opinion that “the analysis of their responses given during the interviews showed the incompetence for the post of the judge. The results of the three interviews are summarized in the report, but in fact, the announcements of three of them about the motives for willingness to become a judge can also be added, which are very expressive.”
Mr. Shushanyan added, “We have recorded and shorthanded the interviews of all the candidates, and it is clearly seen that some of the candidates have obviously given wrong answers to the questions. As you know, specific evaluation standards were established. For example, Armen Harutyunyan was not asked a lot of questions, but he had scored higher than 95 points. Therefore, if we take out the questions that were not asked, we should extract 15-20 points.”
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According to Mushegh Shushanyan, “the contest was held with flagrant violations,” while their organization had published the monitoring results in a report, which was sent to the PACE, and also based on this, the candidates were disqualified. Mr. Shushanyan mentioned that the PACE Advisory Group has submitted its opinion still on December 22, 2014, but prior to the president’s decree an infamous disinformation was disseminated. Mushegh Shushanyan recalled, “Once, it was announced that the so-called list is approved by the relevant Group, that these three candidates were invited for an interview on January 16, later it was said that the date is postponed, later it became clear that the January session was moved to April and so on. I think they were trying to reach some consensus and agreement with relevant PACE officials to conduct this matter somehow, but later, it turned out that the only solution is the president’s decree.”
Mushegh Shushanyan thinks that they will start thinking about new candidates. In with respect, he also recalled that according to the information they received, many former contesters had been instructed from above to take part in the contest regardless of their desire. In the conversation with Aravot.am, candidate Ara Ghazaryan selected as a judge for Armenia in ECHR described these opinions as a personal opinion by these people, and said, “Let them not speak in generalized way but to submit facts, for instance, regarding me. Otherwise, I tell that this is their personal opinion. Shall I interpret their personal opinion? They have presented in generalized way. What shall I respond to this young man? At the most, I must say that it is his personal opinion. Ask all the rest who had ever communicated with me on specific cases about my professional skills.”
To our observation that the PACE Advisory Group has expressed its opinion on December 22, so when he had learned about it, Mr. Ghazaryan replied, “I learned about it from the RA President’s Decree, two days before it, I got an e-mail from the Foreign Ministry saying that I will be going to Strasbourg on 16 January for the interview. As far as I know, the Advisory Group had said that one of the candidates does not meet the requirements, and I do not know which one.” In response to our question that if a new contest is announced, whether Mr. Ghazaryan will take part in, he replied, “At the point, yes.”
Tatev HARUTYUNYAN
