The head of an Armenian parliamentary body said on Wednesday that it will try to question Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in its unfolding inquiry into recently leaked phone calls between two senior law-enforcement officials which caused a political scandal.
The chiefs of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) and Special Investigative Service (SIS) apparently spoke in July shortly before former President Robert Kocharian was arrested over his role in the 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan. The two conversations were wiretapped and posted on the Internet by unknown individuals earlier this month.
In that audio, the NSS’s Artur Vanetsian can be heard telling the SIS’s Sasun Khachatrian that he ordered a judge to sanction Kocharian’s controversial arrest. Vanetsian also urged the SIS not to arrest Yuri Khachaturov, the Armenian secretary general of the Russian-led Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), warning of a negative reaction from Russia. He noted that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian wants investigators to “lock up” Khachaturov.
Pashinian condemned the wiretapping and denied putting pressure on investigators.
Armenia - Artur Vanetsian (R), director of the National Security Service (NSS), and Sasun Khachatrian, head of the Special Investigative Service, talk before a cabinet meeting in Yerevan, 28 June 2018.
For his part, Kocharian, who was released from pre-trial custody in August, portrayed the audio as further proof that the criminal case against him is politically motivated and directed by Pashinian. Top representatives of the former ruling Republican Party of Armenia (HHK), the country’s largest parliamentary force, echoed these claims.
At the HHK’s initiative, the parliament decided on September 12 to set up an ad hoc commission tasked with investigating circumstances of the illegal wiretapping and possible obstruction of justice by senior officials. The multi-partisan commission is headed by Gevorg Kostanian, an HHK lawmaker who served as Armenia’s prosecutor-general from 2013-2016. Its deputy chairman, Alen Simonian, is a close associate of Pashinian.
Kostanian said that the special panel will seek testimony from not only Vanetsian and Khachatrian but also the prime minister. “It is logical that at some point these individuals mentioned by you will definitely be invited to a session of the commission,” he told reporters.
Kostanian added that neither Pashinian nor any other state official can refuse to be questioned by the commission. “Under the National Assembly statutes, any official [summoned by the commission] is obliged to report for sessions of the commission. Failure to do so would be automatically deemed an abuse of power or a manifestation of inactivity,” he warned.
The law also gives such parliamentary bodies access to sensitive details of criminal investigations and even state secrets.