Yesterday a discussion was organized on the new amendments to the electoral code, which was attended by a number of interested international organizations such as the USAID, OSCE, European Union, the European delegation to Armenia, the domestic and a number of international election monitoring organizations, as well as the Central Electoral Commission of Armenia.
MPs from the NA RPA, ARF and Dashnaktsutyun faction were invited too. The other two partners of the coalition, the Legal State and Prosperous Armenia factions did not send their representatives to take part in the discussion.
Following the presidential election 2008 and the clashes of March 1 the PACE developed a demand to Armenia to reform the electoral code and included this demand in the latest two resolutions. The parliament convened an ad hoc to work on the reformation of the electoral code, which is led by the head of the NA standing committee on state and legal affairs Davit Harutyunyan. There are also rumors that this project was written by Davit Harutyunyan and by lawyer and specialist of Constitutional law Hrayr Tovmasyan. The latter was present at the discussion too. As the electoral reformation is the demand of the European institutions, it had to be sent under the consideration of the Venice committee as well. In September Davit Harutyunyan had two versions of the code, which were sent to the committee. He also announced that the interested people and organizations could send their recommendations as well. During these two months about fifteen organizations and individuals have sent their recommendations to amend the draft law. Yesterday’s discussion concerned the mentioned draft law recommendations as well. During the discussion both the international and domestic organizations raised certain issues. For example, they raised the issue of recalling precinct electoral commission (PEC) heads. Especially the parliamentary opposition demands to include this provision in the new Code. The spokesman of the Heritage party Hovsep Khurshudyan reminded about the council elections of 2009 in Yerevan, when their representative in the TEC of Malatia-Sebastia community cut deal with the government and in more than 40 precincts he replaced the representatives of the Heritage party with people from the RPA. Thus, the party failed to control the situation in all these 40 precincts. “Is it a good mechanism to enable the government replace the representatives of the opposition in precincts and deprive the electoral bodies from having opposition powers represented?” asked H.Khurshudyan.
Another member of the Heritage party, MP Armen Martirosyan says that their representative in the Central Electoral Commission was “stolen” by another opposition power. He means Zoya Tadevosyan, who is a member of the opposition ANC. Now the Heritage representatives are asking why they cannot have legal rights to call their representatives in commissions back in case when the opposition powers bribe and intimidate on the opposition representatives in electoral commissions without any punishments. Davit Harutyunyan did not accept the recommendation about enabling parties to call their representatives back. “It means that if somebody does not protect your rights in the manner you want, you can call him back and send somebody else who can do that more aggressively,” said Davit Harutyunyn.
The representatives of the international organizations did not agree with this mechanism either as they believe it will undermine the independence of the commission members. “If you think the people appointed by you should protect the rights of your party, you are mistaken, and that is why you cannot reach an agreement in this country during these many years. You should find people who will protect the law and citizens. The independence of commission members is one of the most important factors. If there must be any mechanism of calling people back, it should be clearly mentioned in which exclusive cases it can be done so that they don’t misinterpret and use that right for other purposes,” said the head o the elections program in the Venice commission Gael Martin-Micaleff.
Concerning the mechanisms of calling people back or forming the composition of commissions both the representatives of the Venice commission and international experts said that they had to find solutions that would be acceptable both for the opposition and the government parties. They brought examples from different countries, where the electoral commissions have different people there and are formed according to different mechanisms. The international experts believe there are no ideal mechanisms for the electoral systems and any country should correspond its electoral mechanism to the inner political situation and system specifics. As for the representatives from Armenia, they believe that there must be political will to hold fair and free elections. According to this draft law that is under discussion, the CEC members are to be appointed by the president from the number of the candidates nominated by the Ombudsman’s office, the president of the bar association and the president of the supreme court. The CEC president will be appointed directly by the president. According to the existing legislation, the CEC members are nominated by the parliamentary political parties. The TECs are formed by the CEC according to the applications of citizens. Only in Precinct Electoral Commissions the existing mechanism will be kept to some extent as they will be formed by the political powers having factions in the parliament. The parliamentary opposition was recommending to form the commissions by the parliamentary parties with 50/50 proportion.
The opposition also disputed about the provision enabling to publish the lists signed by voters. They believe in such case 50% of the electoral violations, i.e. the ballot stuffing will be prevented. There is no such provision in the draft law, but instead of this there is a provision on putting a stamp in voters’ passports, which disappears after 24 hours. Davit Harutyunyan says that the Venice commission has rejected it because it is a violation of the principle of vote secrecy. “The Venice commission does not like that idea. If it is confidential for everyone, only the PEC members can know about the fact that I have gone to the polling station to vote. What about the proxies, monitors and voters that are there at that time? They also bus people to precinct centers. Isn’t it a violation of the vote secrecy when the TV companies show officials voting in precinct centers? The Venice commission only petitions. Well, if so, the Venice commission has been petitioning for the past twenty years to hold fair elections, why don’t you do that?” asked Hamlet Abrahamyan, representative of the ARF in the CEC.
The commission will discuss the issue of publishing the lists and other issues today. Yesterday they also discussed the issues of the pledge for participating in elections, funds, etc. They spoke about the benevolent actions on part of political parties in pre-election periods. It is expected that the recommendations spoken there should be included in the draft law and in the beginning of the coming year shall be sent to the Venice commission. According to the international organizations, the electoral code must be adopted minimum one year before elections, i.e. in this case till this spring. The ANC did not accept the invitation to take part in the summit. Instead of that the ANC coordinator Levon Zurabyan sent a letter to the director of the Election systems international institution project Michael Geto. “Any discussion concerning any issues, including dialogue or cooperation with the authorities, can take place only after setting all the political prisoners free and reaching real success in the process of investigating the clampdown of March 1 and discovering the murderers. By organizing such discussion on the EO the authorities want to imitate that the reason of the widespread violations and abuse during elections is the bad electoral code, and this is a problem that can be solved through amending the electoral code,” writes the letters.