Yesterday the chairman of the National Assembly Hovik Abrahamyan said that the Armenian-Turkish protocols have been removed from the four-day session agenda but still remain in the big agenda of the parliament. Let us recall that last week when returned from Moscow the President of Armenia Serzh Sargsyan made a speech addressed to the RA citizens and said that the reasonable dates are over and that he had made a decision in the session of the coalition and the RA Security Council to suspend the process of ratification of the protocols. The NA by basing on these statements had the right to remove this agenda from the agenda. Let us also recall that the protocols were sent for the discussion of the NA back in February. The sequence of the issues to be discussed in the agenda is determined by the NA chairman. But if the NA chairman because of any reason doesn’t set the issue or any bill to discussion, according to the NA bylaw after three sessions the delayed issues will be mechanically discussed. So if this issue remains in the big agenda then it will be discussed at the fall session of the NA in 2011. And so the NA had to make decision either to accept or renounce the discussion of the protocols. However, if this issue remains in the agenda it may be included in the 4-day session again and even summon an extraordinary session for that. In this case as well the NA should postpone the discussion every 60 days. The member of the ARF faction Artsvik Minasyan thinks that there is uncertainty in such a case. "I see legal uncertainty here. The suspension of the ratification process implies that the protocols should be removed from the agenda and remitted to the presidential residence,” Minasyan said. "An initiative cannot be left on the NA agenda if its author finds its discussion useless for the time being." "The suspension of the protocols is a formality, which does not eliminate the risks of the documents. Withdrawal from the talks is advantageous to our authorities. The best solution is to throw the documents into the waste paper basket," advised Mr. Minasyan. NA MP Tigran Torosyan thinks that in the event of cancellation of the ratification of the protocols certain procedural mistakes were made. In his words, the statement of the coalition should have been followed by the statement of the president but vice versa happened. Besides that, the MP thinks that the threats included in the protocols still exist. “In the legal sense these statements don’t change anything because the protocols remain valid and at any moment that Turkey ratifies those the Armenian parliament may ratify them as well without any trouble. The threats included in the protocols are not annihilated. Armenia has a great opportunity to annihilate those risks by recalling the signatures from the protocols. But this didn’t happen and what has been done doesn’t pursue any goals but some advocacy issues,” says Torosyan.
