Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s message on the occasion of the Constitution Day
Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
Today, July 5, we celebrate the Constitution Day. The Constitution is also called the mother law or basic law. We call it mother law, because in any country with a Constitution, the laws must derive from it, be nourished by the theses, concepts and provisions of the Constitution.
The constitution is called the basic law because in democratic countries it is the only or one of the few laws that is usually adopted by popular vote, that is, in this case, it is the people who vote “for” or “against” the law, the people accept or reject that mother or basic law, the Constitution.
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Such legal regulations also apply for the Republic of Armenia, that is, in our country, the people, as the combination of citizens, act as the constitution maker. Why is this so and what is the logic behind this? By adopting the Constitution and voting in favor of the Constitution, the citizen and the collective of citizens, the people, first declare that they assume the responsibility of having a state and are ready to bear that responsibility.
And in the text of the Constitution itself, the people express their idea of how they imagine that state, its governance, what it should be like in general and what project they will all work on implementing.
And the third, no less important circumstance is that citizens must record in the text of the Constitution the rules of their living in the state they founded and built: the rules of citizen-state relations, citizen-law relations, citizen-citizen relations, human-human relations, human-nature relations.
Accordingly, the constitution is the collective agreement of citizens about the rules, rights and responsibilities of living in one’s own country. The word sovereign, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia, originates from here. The sovereign is the one who decides the rules for living in a given country. In our country, the people are sovereign and this is so not only de jure, but also de-facto after the People’s non-violent velvet revolution of 2018. And it is with this fact that our current Constitution is in deep socio-psychological conflict.
Due to the circumstances known to all of us, the citizen of the Republic of Armenia today does not consider that the Constitution expresses his understanding and agreement about the rules of living with his neighbor, his community, the other residents of his state. The citizen believes that the ruling elite created that text, announced its acceptance and, in fact, introduced it in Armenia.
My belief was and remains that this is a fundamental problem for our country, and our country needs a new Constitution, and at the moment I am talking not so much about the new text, but about the new method of its creation and adoption. We need a new Constitution, which the people will consider to be what they created, what they accepted, what is written in it is their idea of the state they created and the relations between people and citizens in that state.
We need a Constitution that is organically connected with the constitution maker, the people.
This topic is now much speculated both internally and externally. But we must steadily continue our way to strengthening our state, the Republic of Armenia, and making it invulnerable institutionally, psychologically and physically. This is a difficult but honorable path, and we are on the right path, but in order to pass that path, we need to focus on a specific problem, that is serving the state interest of the Republic of Armenia, because the state interest of the Republic of Armenia is the interest of the sovereign, that is, the people of the Republic of Armenia. The interest of real people living in Real Armenia, who created the Republic of Armenia as a tool to ensure their freedom, well-being, happiness, security, to create a just environment in its internationally recognized territory, and we must not deviate from this goal.
Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,
I congratulate all of us on July 5, Constitution Day.
Glory to the martyrs and long live the Republic of Armenia.