Breaking the tradition the Justice Minister Hrair Tovmasyan called a press conference not after 100 days of his service but after one month. His goal is to lay basis for open dialog with press about current problems and their solutions.  

"No to short-term populist solutions" and "Yes to long-term institutional solutions", announced the minister adding that he sees the way of solving all current problems, simply it needs time.

The Minister of Justice considers penal institutions one of the most vulnerable links of the system. "The penal policy in our country needs serious reforms because the functions that are assigned to these institutions - to have reeducated, corrected citizens after taking the punishment,  in fact are not accomplished. Unfortunately, statistics shows even the opposite picture, the number of recidivists grows."

The Minister believes that the only way to solve the problem of overcrowded penal institution is not building new ones. In his opinion the building of new penal facilities is conditioned with the change of regimes. They are going to gradually replace the Soviet "barracks" type cells by solitary cells.

According to the Minister, there are other types of punishment that are rarely applied, such as house arrest. In his words, the role of detention as a type of punishment has to be increased. "Experience shows that sometimes replacing several years of imprisonment with a shorter-term detention with stricter conditions is more effective," Tovmasyan says. He also thinks that applying imprisonment and choice of detention as restraint for certain crimes has to be reconsidered.

Answering to the question from  www.hra.am how he assesses the level of human rights protection at penal institutions, the Minister of Justice said: "There are positive facts and facts that cause great concerns. The positive fact is that no cases of murder were registered in our penal institutions during the last three years; this is really an exceptional thing... Suicides happen, this is one of the problems in penal institutions that we touched upon. Objective factors are quite many; subjective ones connected to certain violations of rights will become the topic of discussion for the Minister, they will be given solutions. I am interested in more long-term and fundemantal solution in this field."

Head of  Judicial Acts Compulsory Enforcement (JACE) Service will continue to officiate. "In a jural state the person cannot be brought to account twice for the same action. He already incurred a penalty. In case of other breaches his former reprimand will be taken into account," Tovmasyan said.

As for the March 1 events the Minister of Justice as a human feels sorry that such things happended in his country. "My work as a minister will be to do everything so that no such postelection developments happen in our country," he assures.

As a lawyer Hrair Tovmasyn does not accept the term "political prisoners" and thinks that in Armenia there are no persons convicted for their political views. Responding to the question "So according to you Nikol Pashinyan is a criminal?" he said: "I don't say that, the court says that. You want me to interpret decisions of Court of Appeal? I don't have such authorities."

www.hra.am also asked the Minister of Justice about the planned reforms in the mechanisms of early conditional release. "Some of my observations show that effectiveness of the mechanism that is used today is not very high," the Minister said adding that there would be reforms but he could not specify at the moment what exactly.

Every day 8000 people come into contact with the Ministry of Justice, including penal institutions. And in order to exclude undue delays H.Tovmasyan is going to perform a legislative change. If a citizen applies with a request to the Minister of Justice and if the solution of the issue depends directly on the Minister, after applying for three times and getting no response his request will be satisfied. 

Hrair Tovmasyan opened a "small secret" for the reporters. He plans a small team, members of which will from time to time visit the Ministry of Justice services as ordinary citizens who want to accomplish certain deals. In such way the Minister wants to see through the eyes of ordinary citizens the problems that exist in the system and accordingly perform legislative changes. Tovmasyan also mentions that there will be structural changes in the Ministry.    

Mary Alexanyan

Source: www.hra.am