The level of human protection is far from being perfect in Armenia. RA Ombudsman Armen Haroutyunyan sees a real threat in this respect. His anxiety is determined by the recent violence and intimidation on journalists.

As freedom of expression is one of the necessary guarantees for democracy establishment, the continuation of such atmosphere can be a threat for our country’s future.

While speaking of Armen Babajanyan’s (editor-in-chief of “Yerevan-Time”) four-year imprisonment, Armen Haroutyunyan mentioned, “Arguments might be brought that he was imprisoned to 4-year term from the legal point of view. But I do think that it is a severe approach to the case. There are opinions that the editor-in-chief of the newspaper had oppositional attitude. Those opinions may be grounded. But I don’t think he made such an act to be sentenced to four-year imprisonment.”

Today Armen Haroutyunyan presented his six-month work in the post of Human Rights Protector. He has got 1794 applications within this time. 854 of them were in written form. 121 written applications found their solution. On the whole, the authors of the applications complain of the activity of courts (106), Yerevan Municipality (95), police forces (71) and Ministry of Justice (61).

By the way, referring to the issue life imprisonment and complaints of prisoners that capital punishment mustn’t be changed to life imprisonment, the Ombudsman noted, “To tell the truth, our survey revealed that there isn’t any breech of rights as capital penalty is already annulled as a means of punishment and changed into life imprisonment. This is a milder approach to the matter. We see no violation in this respect.”