The door of the Ombudsman’s Office has been sealed for eight days, however
Ombudswoman Larisa Alaverdyan every day goes to work and sits with her
colleagues in the general room outside it. On January 4 the president issued an
order handing over the Ombudsman’s staff management to a commission consisting
of three officials until the election of a new Ombusdman. In fact, Alaverdyan
has been removed from her post.

The President’s order is based on the Law on the Ombudsman, according to which
on the 30th day after the adoption of the changes to the Constitution the tenure
of the first Ombudsman ends. However, Alaverdyan considers the order to be
anti-constitutional, since it is not part of the President’s powers to replace
the Ombudsman or appoint another body instead of him/her. According to the
amended Constitution, it is the National Assembly that appoints the Ombudsman,
who must be an independent person who enjoys a high public prestige. But now the
President has dismissed the Ombudswoman and instead appointed a commission,
whose members are officials (Arushan Hakobyan, chief of staff of the
Constitutional Court, Martin Zakaryan, deputy chief of presidential staff, Nune
Khachatryan, chief of staff of the Ministry of Justice).

The move is seen by some as an expression of displeasure by President Robert
Kocharyan against Alaverdyan, whose tenure as the republic’s first person to
hold the office has frequently revealed a lack of proper attention to issues of
civil rights by the current administration.

The President is known to be unhappy with the first Ombudsman Office.

(Alaverdyan, herself, was known to be a supporter of Kocharyan, but during her
tenure her reports have consistently been contrary to interests of his
administration.)

Alaverdyan was appointed Ombudsman in January 2004. In the subsequent two years
she has filed reports (www.ombuds.am ) that have harshly gone counter to the
current administration. Particularly, the Ombudswoman’s office has sharply
denounced the manner in which authorities handled the opposition parties’
infamous rally in April 2004 in which excessive violence was used to break up
demonstrations. Secondly, she has been a champion for owner rights in the
controversial urban development project around Yerevan’s Buzand street -- a
massive construction plan that is a potential financial windfall for several
Armenian oligarchs who have displaced families in the process.

The authorities launched a crusade against the Ombudswoman, (see Rights and
Wrongs ). She became the only official appointed by President Kocharyan who not
only did not become the executor of the authorities’ will, but also remaining
loyal to her principles did work that unmasked the illegal actions of the
authorities.

“My task was not to unmask the authorities, but to expose human rights
violations. My task was to help the authorities to remove the roots of
violations of human rights,” Alaverdyan told ArmeniaNow. “That help was not
accepted, that is it was considered superfluous. It is possible that this help
was against their interests. I failed to change the system, but the system
failed to change me either.”

By Vahan Ishkhanyan, ArmeniaNow reporter