Interview with Minister of Justice Gevorg Danielyan

In all of the recent reports of international organizations there is a special focus on justice, and usually, the court system receives negative characteristics. Critical accents prevail in the OSCE/ODIHR report. Does it concern you?

They cannot emphasize just positive issues. If the reports are prepared with involvement of international experts, the first issue is to find out the shortcomings in the area. Concerning the achievements, they were not in the position to strict themselves to talk about the achievements.  Nevertheless, we can meet some positive colors in the reports.

(As a positive remark in the report this one can be mentioned «the government continuously improves conditions of the court building and conditions.  Now all courts are provided with computers and recording equipment»).

What is your attitude towards these documents?

All recent reports describe the situation in two aspects, they focus not only on legal reforms but also on implementation of reforms. Evaluation can be regarded as complete and unbiased, if the two aspects are assessed equally. In this respect, the report is professional. If an assessment is one-sided, and gives rhetorical appraisal to various situations, then it does not deserve serious attention. In this term, there are also several reservations. In some cases, the report suggested to adopt legislation on some issues, whereas the legislation is alreadt adopted. There were conclusions based on assumptions. For these cases we should say that assumptions are not enough to initiate concrete actions.  It is not right to undertake actions in the area of legal and court reforms only on presented assumptions even if these assumptions are made by experts.

Which conclusions of the report you do not consider as substantially justified?

The authors made inappropriate generalization in their conclusions, diregarding the fact that the focus of the assessment was exclusively on criminal cases related to March 1 events. However, these cases are only a part of the cases heard in the courts during this year and do not represent the whole picture.  For example, they mentioned large amounts of court officers at the hearings.  One can imagine that many court officers are present in all court hearings, whereas in all other hearings only one or two court officers are present. 

The essence of court procedure of cases of March 1, and the situation in the court rooms forced us to provide such conditions.  Or, the report's authors proposed a suggestion to establish a special invetigation service to investigate cases about violations of the police and interrogators during investigation of the cases. It should be mentioned that there is a Special investigation service, which operates for more than two years with a mission to investigate cases concerning crime of state officers. And investigators have a status of state officers.

Not all interpetations of the statistical data are adequate. For example, the report talks abot decisions on acquittal. 13% of acquittal decisions is estimated  as too small part of all decisions, but we should not forget that several years ago there were no aquittals at all.

In the reports there are not only assessments but also suggestions

These suggestions mainly talk about legal principles and standards, which is senseless to reject.  The majority of suggestions presented in the report was taken into consideration while implementing legal reforms. Most of the suggestions are included in the new Criminal Procedure Code, and this document was ready before publication of the report. We cannot form legislation and legal practice based on extreme, it is dangerous.

The experts made concrete suggestions.  They propose to limit using preliminary detention, and urge to take steps on providing equal rights to prosecutors and lawyers. Are you going to undertake concrete steps in this direction?

For example, in repsect to detention, we planned more than what is suggested by ODIHR experts.  New criminal procedure code already states that the level of crime cannot serve as basis for using detention as prevention tool. In any criminal case, if there are no circumstances which substantiate selection of detention as preventive tool, application of prevention should be regarded as not legal.

In general, we plan to revise the legal basis and conditions of preventive instruments. Concerning equity of court sides, the report authors have reservations regarding provision of competition. We agree with this in theoretical and practical terms. The issue is not only the legislation. The issue is connected also with attitude of judges.

Nevertheless, in Armenia the phrase «independent court system» sounds with strong reservations.

Unfortunately, not everybody tries to be sincere about this issue. What is societal expectation from us to say that judges are reserved and not independent? We can say that and go forward. I do not take seriously the intention to criticize and target the court system. If we have issues in this area, and there are issues here, we need to assess objectively how these issues are manifested and what we should do about them. 

In your opinion, in what way these issues are manifested and what we should do?

I state that there is a serious progress.  I would not make haste to see that independence of judges reached its extreme position.  It is not accidental that international structures recently mention in their reports the phenomena of corruption. When we talk about independence of judges we should not view it as independence from the law and Constitution.

We should not make the independence as end in itself. We should not just say that judges are not independent and we also should not let the judges to be left without any supervision, most importantly, internal supervision.

Interview by Lousine Vasilyan