The doctoral dissertation of an Armenian judge, who freed former President Robert Kocharian from custody last August, may have come under scrutiny for political reasons, a senior government official said on Monday.
The Court of Appeals judge, Aleksandr Azarian, overturned a lower court’s decision to allow investigators to arrest Kocharian on charges stemming from the 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan. He ruled at the time that the Armenian constitution gives the ex-president immunity from prosecution.
The higher Court of Cassation subsequently struck down Azarian’s ruling, paving the way for Kocharian’s renewed arrest in December. Kocharian was again freed on May 18 pending the outcome of his trial which began on May 13.
The decision made by a district court judge presiding over the trial angered Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian and his political allies and supporters. Pashinian demanded on May 20 a mandatory “vetting” of all Armenian judges, saying that many of them remain linked to “the former corrupt system.”
A few days after Kocharian’s latest release, Smbat Gogian, the head of Armenia’s Supreme Qualification Committee, a state body overseeing the granting of postgraduate degrees, claimed that Azarian plagiarized some parts of his doctoral thesis.
The allegation, strongly denied by the senior judge, led an Armenian parliament committee on science and education to hold on Monday an extraordinary session on “possible legislative solutions for the fight against plagiarism.” Gogian also attended the meeting.
Gogian stood by the plagiarism claim when he spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian service. He said his agency arrived at such a conclusion after being alerted by an individual whom he refused to name.
“By comparing files with each other, our [verification] system showed that [Azarian’s] dissertation has textual matches with two other dissertations,” added Gogian. One of those dissertations was written by Vazgen Rshtuni, the chairman of the Court of Appeals.
Asked whether political motives are behind the scandal, the official said: “Maybe they are … But I insist that the Supreme Qualification Committee did not initiate it.”
Azarian charged, meanwhile, that the plagiarism allegations as well as the parliamentary discussion organized by pro-government lawmakers are part of a coordinated smear campaign targeting him. “I think it’s clear to everyone that all bodies have been explicitly instructed to campaign against me,” the judge told News.am.
Azarian also said that he and Rshtuni were supervised by the same legal scholar when they worked on their dissertations. This why, he claimed, the two texts may have the same passages.
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