Honorable Madam President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
Honorable Mister Secretary General of the Council of Europe,
Honorable Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
High-ranking guests speaking from this rostrum commonly start their statement with the following sentence: “It is a great honor for me to speak from the rostrum of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.” It is indeed a great honor, but allow me to say that speaking from this rostrum has particular meaning and significance for me.
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I will now try to explain the reasons why.
In the summer of 1999, as editor-in-chief of Orageer daily, I was awaiting the judgment in the criminal case instigated against me. The criminal case had been triggered by an article published in the newspaper that I was editing.
The prosecutor demanded convicting me to three years of imprisonment and sending me to jail. Back in those days, it was virtually impossible for a court to depart from the prosecutor’s claim. But then, something resembling a miracle took place, and the court, while convicting me to a one-year prison sentence, did it in such a way as to postpone my actual imprisonment.
It later emerged that there was only one reason for this: as Armenia was preparing to become a member of the Council of Europe and PACE President Lord Russell Johnston was about to visit Armenia to discuss accession-related issues, the authorities had come to appreciate that jailing an editor would not set a very positive background for the visit of such an official.
During his visit, Lord Johnston had discussed my situation, and the authorities had apparently promised not to send me behind bars.
Indeed, after Lord Johnston’s visit, my conviction became conditional, and owing to the process of Armenia’s accession to the Council of Europe during 1999-2000, I stayed out of prison.
Although in subsequent years criminal proceedings were launched against me on several occasions, my imprisonment was rather postponed and eventually happened after the well-known events of 1 March 2008, when unlawful actions of the authorities led to the death of 10 Armenian citizens, including eight peaceful demonstrators. At the time, thousands of opposition supporters were being taken to police stations only for participating in a demonstration.
Moreover, about one hundred political leaders ended up behind the bars as political prisoners. Citizens deprived of the right to assemble, jailed politicians and their relatives, as well as the relatives of the victims of March 1 vested all hope and faith in the Council of Europe and this Parliamentary Assembly, because after March 1, the Constitution was essentially repealed in the Republic of Armenia, and people had neither any hope nor access to any effective legal remedy.
The five resolutions adopted by the PACE in connection with those events brought a breath of fresh air into Armenia, vesting in the people hope and the belief that not everything was lost. Held in pretrial detention since 2009 and convicted to seven years of imprisonment in 2010, I spent only two years in prison before I was free again owing to the support of the Republic of Armenia citizens, as well as the Council of Europe.
In the winter of 2011, I was visited in prison by Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s Commissioner for Human Rights: the visit was essential for drawing international attention to the general problem of political prisoners in Armenia and to my problem in particular.
Not long thereafter, the European Court of Human Rights declared my case an urgency, and two months later, the authorities released me on an act of pardon—knowing all too well that the Council of Europe’s next step would be to officially declare me a political prisoner.
The next round of my engagement with the CoE and the PACE was December 2018. At the time, I was already the Prime Minister of Armenia—a status that I had reached as a result of the non-violent, velvet, people’s revolution that took place in April and May 2018. It was time for the next milestone in the revolution—the snap parliamentary election in my country.
In that election, our political party received over 70 percent of the vote; but more importantly, the PACE Observation Mission concluded that the election was democratic. Quoting the assessment of the PACE Observation Mission, “owing to the velvet revolution and the political will demonstrated by the authorities, it has been possible to conduct democratic elections in Armenia.”
The other international observation missions, too, recognized the December snap parliamentary election as a free, fair, democratic, and competitive election—an assessment previously never given to any election held in Armenia.
This was the first parliamentary election in my country, the official outcome o which was not challenged in the Constitutional Court, the first parliamentary election to produce a result that was unreservedly accepted by all the political forces and the general public.
And now, standing here as a Prime Minister elected by the people of the Republic of Armenia, I wish to extend gratitude to the Council of Europe and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe for the support to human rights and democracy in Armenia.
Democracy has now prevailed in Armenia, and it has happened owing to the non-violent, velvet, people’s revolution that took place in Armenia about a year ago this time. I wish to underline clearly that the revolution was conceived in the soul and heart of the Armenian people, and no foreign power was in any way whatsoever involved in our revolution. Our revolution had no geopolitical content or undercurrents.
But then, how did this revolution take place? How did it succeed? In 2015, close to the end of his second presidential term, Armenia’s then de-facto leader Serzh Sargsyan implemented constitutional amendments that would, by April 2018, transition Armenia from a semi-presidential form of government to a parliamentary system.
When he was initiating those constitutional amendments, he publicly promised never again to aspire to a position of Armenia’s leader—in this case the position of the Prime Minister. In 2018, however, it became clear that he was the ruling majority’s candidate for the position of the prime minister. Having learnt about it, me and my friends started a walking march on 31 March 2018 from Gyumri, the second largest city of Armenia, to the capital city Yerevan, en route urging Armenia’s citizens to prevent Serzh Sargsyan from carrying out his political swindle.
We walked for 13 days, passing over 200 kilometers, covering the whole process live in the social media. In the capital city Yerevan, countless schoolchildren—boys and girls first joined our movement, followed by their elder brothers and sisters, followed by their mothers and fathers, followed by their grandfathers and grandmothers. Although on 17 April 2018, Serzh Sargsyan was elected by the Parliament as Prime Minister, and I was once again in prison on 22 April, Serzh Sargsyan was forced under popular pressure on the very next day to release me and my friends and to resign. 15 days later, on 8 May 2018, that same Parliament elected me as Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia, because that was what the whole Armenian public demanded.
This is how our revolution took place—the revolution that we came to call the Revolution of Love and Solidarity, because it was from the very outset based upon the logic of a non-violent struggle. Open hands raised in the air were the symbol of our revolution. They signified our repeated pledge that, even if the police and the incumbent used violence against us, we would not answer the violence with violence.
Love and the belief in non-violent struggle truly prevailed over the oligarchic and corrupt system that had ruled Armenia for years. They prevailed without any violence and any victims. They prevailed without any weapons. Only with open hands raised in the air.
Dear Friends,
Vast political changes are truly happening in Armenia today. We have managed to root out systemic corruption, to eliminate the monopolistic structure of the economy, and to create real prerequisites for everyone’s equality before the law. Every day, we are further reducing the gray economy: over the last 10 months, over 50 thousand jobs were brought out of the shadow economy or created in Armenia. Our fiscal revenue collection has significantly exceeded the targets, and we plan to overcollect around 80 billion Armenian drams in fiscal revenue during 2019.
These additional funds will be used to build roads, to invest in education and health care, to develop the regions proportionately, and to increase wages. Our government’s activities are transparent and accountable, and our power stems from the expression of our people’s free will.
Armenia is today unequivocally a democratic country with absolute freedom of expression and freedom of assembly. The election rigging and systemic corruption chapter in our country has been closed irreversibly, and our government is continuing to enhance respect for human rights.
However, our democracy needs to be fortified, to be reinforced with economic and institutional safeguards. The development of democratic institutions, the existence of an independent judiciary, and the creation and strengthening of anti-corruption institutions are all key areas in which we need the support of the Council of Europe.
All of this is important not only for consolidating the outcomes of our political revolution, but also succeeding in our recently-launched economic revolution. The economic revolution we have undertaken is primarily aimed at encouraging the economic activity of our citizens, creating real opportunities for them, making Armenia even more attractive for investments and tourism, and becoming a true pioneer in the field of technologies.
We are convinced that we shall succeed in this difficult mission of ours, because our people have regained faith in our own strength and our own future.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict remains a serious challenge for our whole region. Like any democratic government, Armenia’s Government is committed to the principle of only peaceful settlement of the issue.
However, the democratic changes that took place in our country have added some new shades to our understanding of how the issue can be settled.
It is indeed crucial that we have managed to launch a rather constructive and positive dialogue with Ilham Aliyev, the President of Azerbaijan, but I am convinced that mere dialogue between the leaders is not enough for settling the issue. It is very important to launch a dialogue between societies, as well, so that we prepare our respective societies for peace and not for war.
In a recent press conference in Yerevan, I stated that the social media could serve as an important platform for such dialogue, where Armenians and Azerbaijanis unfortunately still continue to interact using a language of obscenity and hate.
Over 30 years of the conflict, we could have conceivably exhausted the vocabulary of hate and obscenity and helped one another to understand our respective positions and at least attempted to find the reasons that keep us from being understandable for one another.
I personally initiated this discourse—by stating in the Armenian Parliament several times that any solution of the Karabakh issue must be acceptable for the people of Armenia, the people of Nagorno Karabakh, and the people of Azerbaijan.
The statement not only was unprecedented, but also essentially outlines the formula that could pave the way for peaceful settlement of the Karabakh issue. Unfortunately, we have still not heard similar statements from Azerbaijan, and I do hope that this message, conveyed from this rostrum of peace, will earn an adequate response in Azerbaijani society.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
There is a reason why I just called this Assembly’s rostrum a “rostrum of peace.” I do believe that this is the place where obscenity ought to be replaced with dialogue, provocations—with constructive engagement. Unfortunately, though, the rostrum of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe is at times used also to instigate wars.
Here, I cannot but note that the discussions on Nagorno Karabakh, which took place in the Parliamentary Assembly in January 2016, became a prelude to the Four-Day War unleashed in April of the same year and created a fertile ground for Azerbaijan’s armed forces to launch an attack.
I would not confidently assert that they were doing so consciously, but still, the authors of those discussions and documents triggered a war that cost several hundred lives to Armenia, Nagorno Karabakh, and Azerbaijan. To this day, in other international platforms as well as the PACE, we are unfortunately seeing attempts to drag these organizations into geopolitical games and conflicts, attempting to turn them into parties to conflicts—behavior that is absolutely contrary to the mission and essence of these organizations.
Needless to say, each conflict must be examined in terms of its merits and essence, and passing judgment on any conflict without understanding its origin, causes, nature, and peculiarities would be tantamount to playing with human lives and destinies. This is why we continue to believe that the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs should be the only ones dealing with the settlement of the Nagorno Karabakh conflict, together with the three parties to the conflict, because this is the only format wherein the participants have information on not only the status quo, but also the whole history and the subtleties of the negotiations from day one.
The OSCE Minsk Group is the format that was established as a platform for dialogue between all the parties to the conflict—Nagorno Karabakh, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, and we are nowadays taking measures to reinstate dialogue between Nagorno Karabakh and Azerbaijan within the format of the OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The foregoing does not in any way mean that there is no role for the Council of Europe to play in the Karabakh conflict zone. This organization, which is keen on the promotion of human rights and democratic institutions in Europe, has paid no attention whatsoever to supporting non-governmental organizations operating in Nagorno Karabakh.
The PACE has taken no steps whatsoever to promote the consolidation of democratic institutions and development of civil society in Nagorno Karabakh.
This has been explained by the fact that there are ambiguities and discrepancies regarding the status of Nagorno Karabakh, and that Nagorno Karabakh is not internationally recognized as a state.
But the engagement of PACE would have nothing to do with sovereign status. If Nagorno Karabakh is still not recognized internationally as a sovereign state, is there an international debate on whether the people living in Nagorno Karabakh are human beings? For the Council of Europe, a global pioneer in the protection of human rights, should documents prevail over real people?
From this high rostrum, I wish to make an appeal to the Council of Europe and all organizations in Europe that work to promote human rights, the freedom of expression, and democratic institutions.
Do help the people of Nagorno Karabakh to improve their laws and institutions and to promote human rights, the rule of law, and independence of the judiciary! Citizens of Karabakh—human beings will benefit from it. Humans are worth much more any document or any political or group interests, and I am convinced that the Council of Europe and this Parliamentary Assembly will be guided by these very values.
Honorable Madam President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
Honorable Mister Secretary General of the Council of Europe,
Honorable Members of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe,
It has been very important and a true honor for me to speak before this Assembly on the first anniversary of the Armenian Revolution of Love and Solidarity.
Declaring Armenia Country of the Year in 2018, the Economist posed the following question: will Armenia be able to advance the success achieved in 2018? I am honored to declare from this high rostrum that democracy in Armenia is irreversible—for the simple reason that its victory was secured not by political leaders or parties, but by the people, the citizens, and the youth: they know now that they are the driving force of all progress, and they will certainly not miss this exceptional opportunity to turn Armenia into a beacon of democracy, the rule of law, transparency, and tolerance.
Armenia can and will remain a source of good news for all those who believe in democracy.
Thank you.
