“Haykakan Zhamanak” says a Yerevan court’s decision to free former President Robert Kocharian from custody was probably the “last straw” that led Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian to opt for what he called a “surgical intervention” in the Armenian judiciary. “It turned out that just because the authorities do not interfere in the work of the courts does not necessarily guarantee that others will not interfere either,” writes the pro-government paper. Noting that most Armenian judges were appointed under the previous governments, it insists that the current authorities are “doing everything to establish the rule of law in the country and ensure that everything is within the bounds of law.” “But the bounds of law are decided by judges, many of whom had received political orders from the previous authorities,” it says.
“Unlike the legislative and executive branches formed through a free expression of the people’s will and have complete legitimacy, the judicial system is linked to the former corrupt system through visible and invisible threads,” “Zhoghovurd” says, echoing Pashinian’s statement made on Monday. The paper also reports that the Yerevan district court has suspended Kocharian’s trial and asked the Constitutional Court to certify whether the former president can be prosecuted on charges stemming from the 2008 violence in Yerevan. It says the judge presiding over the trial made the decision at the request of Kocharian’s lawyers, ignoring prosecutors’ opinion.
In another commentary, “Zhoghovurd” rejects the former ruling HHK’s criticism of Pashinian’s claims that some forces are plotting a “treasonous” conspiracy against the Armenian government in Nagorno-Karabakh. The paper says that HHK leaders have no moral right to bring up the Karabakh issue in their public statements. “Nobody has forgotten that the four-day April [2016] war took place and we suffered more than 100 casualties and lost 800 hectares of land during the HHK’s rule,” it says.
(Lilit Harutiunian)
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