“Law violations are systematic”

01/05/2006 Rafael TEIMURAZYAN

Besides these pages the report also contains attachments, where there are letters addressed to different officials and other relevant documents. The most interesting part in this report is the conclusion. This conclusion states that public bodies violate the rights of different groups of the people by adopting different legal provisions and decisions, which contradict the Constitution, and that that can bring to bad results and contradict different national strategies, one of which is the national strategy of poverty and corruption reduction.

“Representatives of public bodies violate human rights by replacing democratic methods of management with other methods, by exceeding their powers and by direct violation of the law”, concludes L. Alaverdyan.

According to L. Alaverdyan the civic rights of free will of citizens are violated both directly and indirectly by using administrative resources, i.e. citizens’ rights of directly participating in the policy making process of the country through democratic elections is violated. According to the first ombudsman, ordinary citizens and the society are alienated from political processes, which undermines their democratic participation in the county’s policy-making process through elections, as a result of which a group of people stay in power with the help of their strong, hierarchic relations, thus undermine the rights of citizens and make the society vulnerable. “There is much degradation in our society, especially in the fields of free speech and access to information: all sources of information are turning into campaigning, thus often not providing fair and true information for citizens”, states the report of Larisa Alaverdyan. According to her the fact that the top authorities made a decision unexpectedly to stop the activities of the human rights protection institute shows that they don’t have any clue yet about the importance of the ombudsman’s institution and its activities and this problem is still pending. Yesterday Larisa Alaverdyan spoke about concrete examples of human right violations too.

In regard to the recent decision of the RA Constitutional Court concerning the apartments sold on Buzand street and the people forced out of their own apartments L. Alaverdyan said that she had sent letters to high ranked officials and the mayor of Yerevan writing that those activities were contradicting the Constitution. “The president and other top bodies don’t need any information regarding this”, assured Mrs. Alaverdyan. Concerning the judicial system L. Alaverdyan said that “After adopting the new Constitution the judicial system is still dependent on the executive branch of government”. However, Mrs. Alaverdyan brought some more examples to show that in many cases the state can’t recover the violated rights of citizens. “Is a country that is not able to recover the violated rights of vulnerable social groups strong? The current authorities are not strong, they have power, but they are not strong enough,” concludes the first RA ombudsman.