Armenian law-enforcement agencies and courts remain the principal source of serious human rights violations in the country, Ombudsman Karen Andreasian said in his annual report released over the weekend.
The report alleges 167 “systemic problems” which the human rights defender believes led to abuses suffered by thousands of Armenians at the hands of various state bodies in 2014. It says that the security apparatus and judiciary were responsible for the most serious of those abuses.
As was the case in his previous reports, Andreasian singled out widespread ill-treatment of criminal suspects in pre-trial custody. He accused state prosecutors and a law-enforcement agency subordinate to them, the Special Investigative Service (SIS), of continued failure to investigate torture allegations. He also faulted Armenian courts for routinely accepting confessions made by defendants under duress.
Local and international human rights organizations have long described police torture as the most serious form of human rights violation in Armenia. The practice seems to be continuing unabated despite repeated government pledges to tackle it.
Zhanna Aleksanian, a human rights activist and writer, said torture frequently results in the imprisonment of innocent people charged with serious crimes. “These abuses are never investigated and punished,” she said, backing the findings of Andreasian’s report.
The reports covers a wide range of other areas of concern, including a controversial pension reform initiated by the government, problems with healthcare, irrigation and even the protracted reconstruction of Armenia’s northern regions devastated by a 1988 earthquake. It also addresses hazing and other chronic abuses in the Armenian armed regularly causing deaths of conscripts.
Andreasian noted that while the number of non-combat deaths in the army ranks continued to fall in 2014 the Armenian military is still not doing enough to prevent them. It also criticized as flawed and incomplete criminal inquiries of some of those cases conducted by military investigators.
Reacting to the report, the Defense Ministry in Yerevan said that on Monday the criticism is “on the whole” legitimate. “We keep working and reforming the armed forces,” the ministry spokesman, Artsrun Hovannisian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian service (Azatutyun.sm). “In-depth systemic reforms require some time.”
Hovannisian added that the ministry will continue to cooperate with the ombudsman’s office in combatting army crimes.