Changing Samvel Babayan’s preventive detention and sending the case to an additional investigation was a “rough” legal solution of the problem which is not directly connected with the revolution. The Court of First Instance has not proven his connection with “Igla’s” transfer and Euro “laundry”, only doubts have remained which should be explained in favor of the defendant.
Babayan, of course, is not Mother Teresa, he is a field commander with respective education and special imaginations about the state, but it is not a ground for bringing forth understandable accusations against him at all. Samvel Babayan’s explanation that they wanted to isolate him seems trustworthy to me, because he was the factual leader of “Ohanyan-Raffi-Oskanian” pre-election alliance and there was a task of not allowing the alliance to pass to the Parliament.
Jirair Sefilian’s release seems more controversial to me, inasmuch as he does not reject the armed political fights. During Ter-Petrossian’s term of office he had a connection with “Dro” group, was imprisoned for illegally keeping weapons during Kocharyan and Sargsyan’s terms of office. It is logical to suppose that he can dislike Nikol Pashinyan’s authority one day and in that case he will again decide to use his “right to uprise”, and it is still a question of Pashinyan will manage to detain him or Sefilian will manage to successfully “uprise” this time.
Changing the preventive detentions of the persons who made an armed attack against the police patrol can be regarded as a justification of such actions and become a bad precedent for our state. If we leave the so called extremely free commentaries on the “right to uprise” aside, then we can record that yes, the detention as a preventive mean is often applied by our law enforcement bodies without any necessity and from not legal motives. But in that case the “highest threshold” should be defined and the preventive detention should not be applied if lower than the underlined threshold. If the people accused of heavy crimes on police patrol case can be granted freedom then why the same cannot be applied, for example, to a thief. Perhaps he was uniquely “uprising” when doing that supposed action as well. Or why the preventive detention of the person accused of beating out of hooligan reasons cannot be changed? It is not excluded that he was beating his friend “for the sake of the nation”. Maybe it is time for our humanist MPs to think about all detainees and not only the “insurgents”.
ARAM ABRAHAMYAN
