“We managed to prove that there should be an investigation if there are reports on acts of torture, the investigation should satisfy certain conditions and the person should not be kept in prison without any grounds,” referring to the ECHR decision on Mataghis case, said Hayk Alumyan, the lawyer of Razmik Sargsyan, Musa Serobyan and Arayik Zalyan, who are acquitted by the Shirak marz court. Note that today, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) issued the verdict for Zalyan and others vs. Armenia case. It is about three former soldiers that were subjected to violence during their military service as they were suspected of murdering two fellow soldiers.
Lawyer Alumyan noted that there is going to be a bulk of ECHR decisions against Armenia in the future, “The cases against Armenia are not growing at the European Court of Human Rights. Simply, the cases were sent from Armenia, and as a result of some tricks, they were almost not investigated. When their trick was disclosed, it is clear that we had a large number of accumulated cases. The Mataghis case was presented to ECHR twelve years ago, now, the cases that had been accumulated and no case was investigated regarding Armenia for almost three years, the decisions are followed one after the other. As a result of these tricks, an opportunity was created that the officials are making loud statements here, look, what a good courts we have that the ECHR decisions about us are so few, fewer than against Azerbaijan and Georgia but, in fact, it is a result of one trick. But I assure you, there is going to be a bulk of decisions.”
To the question about the kind of trick, the lawyer said, “It was a trick that they could do so that our cases were not investigated there.” Whether the ECHR decision can contribute to the reopening of the cases and the operation of finding the real culprits, the lawyer said, “The culprits must be found regardless of the Court’s decision, they must seek and find them and the ECHR decision has nothing to do with it.” Note that the lawsuit submitted to the ECHR was to find out whether they were acts of torture or not, whether the issue is torture is properly investigated in Armenia or not. The issue of keeping the mentioned former three soldiers in prison illegally for four days was also touched upon. During that period, the acts of torture were exercised against them and during the torture they were trying to extract a confession testimony.
Arpine SIMONYAN
