“I know many journalists who do not work in any media, they write articles and submit to various mass media, let’s say, one of them may see the protest online and go down to cover it. Do we have the right to obstacle them?” today, such a question was raised by the “Heritage” faction MP Alexander Arzumanyan referring to the Head of the Legal Department of the Police, Meruzhan Hakobyan. The latter said at the Committee on Human Rights during the discussion of the Ombudsman’s 2014 report, “Very often, the journalists become participants of the protest and are deviate from their core activities, therefore, the police wants them to obtain accreditation prior to the protests or wear special badges and dress in a jacket.”
The Police representative firstly found it difficult to answer the question of the Deputy. Then, he said that they are also concerned about this problem and they are trying to give a solution to the problem. Later on, in the interview with the journalists, he said a special project is being prepared, which will spell out the differentiating attributes of the journalists: special vests, badges and so on. He said that the project is still in the stage of preparation and it will be definitely submitted for public hearing, especially among the media organizations. The Head of the Legal Department of the Police also added that if the journalists obtain accreditations, the cases of interfering with the protests would become less.
Ombudsman Karen Andreasyan’s Deputy, Armen Grigoryan, also noted that in 2014, there were some cases of restriction of peaceful assemblies by the police, including the scattering of a gathering illegitimately, use of physical force against the participants of the protest, restriction of their free mobility, and in some cases, imposing to unnecessary detention. “Cases of interfering with legal activities of the human rights activists and the journalists, use of violence against the latter were recorded, against which the Police had not initiated enough steps towards prevention, detection and punishing the perpetrators,” said Grigoryan and added that in a number of cases, in contrary to the requirement of the law, the police officers have not provided the detained or apprehended persons with lawyers and have not explained their rights. “Cases of late registrations for the persons apprehended by the Police, non-registration, as well as inappropriate taking of identification documents of the citizens have been recorded. For individual cases, the Police officers continued violating the due dates of reviewing the reporting, discussing thereof for decision-making defined by the law, as well as failed to meet the requirements for proper provision of a translator to a non-Armenian speaker when giving an explanation,” said Deputy Ombudsman.
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Alexander Arzumanyan was also annoyed by the fact that during the rallies, the Police officers are illegally apprehending quite known people to clarify their identity. “Everyone knows this person, as they say, every dog knows this man in the city and the documents are with him, but the police officers do not recognize him for whatever reason,” said the Deputy, noting a few examples. The Police officer failed to give any specific explanations.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
