1. Political Prisoners. Persecution of dissenters. 
Violation of Journalists' Rights

    a. Civic Groups Raise Alarm Over Government "Repression"

[24.06.2004]

More than a dozen non-governmental organizations and prominent public figures
issued on Thursday an emotional appeal to Armenian courts urging them to stop
imprisoning opposition activists on “trumped-up charges” brought by the
government.


In a joint open letter, they warned of the Armenian judiciary’s transformation
into “an instrument of repression and an executioner of freedom.”

“Do not keep silent, your position has a fateful significance today,” reads the
letter addressed to the judges. “Raise your voice, use all possible levers to
stop this criminal course.”

“We simply risk failing to become a free country,” the signatories said. “We
have already lived in an unjust and brutal country. Will we ever learn to draw
lessons from the past?”

The joint call followed Tuesday’s decision by a court in the southern Armavir
region to sentence a local opposition activist to 18 months in prison on a
dubious drug charge widely attributed to his participation in the recent
opposition campaign against President Robert Kocharian. Lavrenti Kirakosian,
mentioned in the statement, thus became the sixth oppositionist to face criminal
prosecution and imprisonment since the start of the campaign three months ago.


In all such cases, the judges, who are appointed and can be fired by Kocharian,
fully endorsed the charges leveled by state prosecutors. Armenian courts have
also routinely rubber-stamped shorter “administrative arrests” of more than a
hundred other individuals who took part in the unsanctioned opposition protests.


Among the signatories of the letter was Hranush Kharatian, a respected
sociologist and the head of the Armenian government’s Department on Ethnic
Minorities and Religion. “I do agree that people are sometimes arrested on not
only unsubstantiated but also fabricated charges,” she told RFE/RL, singling out
the cases against Kirakosian and a 24-year-old oppositionist who got a 18-month
jail term for hitting a police officer with a plastic bottle.

“Why should a young man spend 1.5 years in prison for somehow expressing his
political beliefs?” Kharatian asked.

Another signatory, Izabella Sargsian of a group called Youth for Democracy, also
condemned the politically charged prosecutions. “The judges must defy the state
machine,” she said. “That should mean handing down just and humane verdicts or
resigning from their posts.”

The Armenian authorities have denied any political motives behind the punishment
of the opposition activists. They also say that the opposition drive for regime
change is unconstitutional and amounts to an attempt at coup d’etat.

Human rights advocates, however, insist that the government crackdown on the
opposition runs counter to Armenia’s constitution and international obligations.
According to Natalia Martirosian, head of the Armenian Committee of the Helsinki
Civil Assembly, the judges not only carry out government orders and but make
unfair decisions of their own. “The overall atmosphere is such that officials
want to take actions that will please more high-level individuals,” she said.
“This is even more dangerous than carrying out direct orders.”

By Ruzanna Stepanian


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1768

    b. Police Halt Probe Of Opposition Leader's Beating

[25.06.2004]

The Armenian police have "suspended" their criminal investigation into the April
22 severe beating of a prominent opposition figure because of their failure to
identify any suspects, police officials said on Friday.


Ashot Manucharian, who held top security positions in Armenia's first
post-Communist government in the early 1990s, suffered a fractured jaw and spent
days in intensive care after being attacked by unknown persons in broad daylight
in the center of Yerevan. It was the most recent in a series of beatings of
prominent individuals critical of the Armenian government.

Among them were opposition leader Victor Dallakian and human rights campaigner
Mikael Danielian. The violence, blamed by the opposition on the authorities,
prompted protests from international organizations. The Yerevan office of the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe expressed on April 29
concern at "an alarming lack of progress" in the official inquiries. Nobody has
so far been arrested or charged in connection with those incidents.

Artavazd Ghazarian, a senior officer in the police department of Yerevan's
central Kentron district, told RFE/RL that the law-enforcement authorities have
decided to stop looking for Manucharian's attackers in accordance with the
Armenian criminal code. He said the investigation may still resume if new facts
shedding light on the attack emerge.

Manucharian, who has not yet publicly spoken since the beating, was not
available for comment. But one of his close associates, Eduard Simoniants,
dismissed the official explanation as unconvincing. "This is the first time that
the investigation into a crime committed two months ago is being suspended in
Armenia," he told RFE/RL. "There are probably some other reasons involved."

"I am convinced that the authorities are not interested in tracking down the
criminals," Simoniants added. An eyewitness has described Manucharian's
attackers as three strongly built men with shaven heads and short haircuts. The
description resembles the appearance of about two dozen men that tried to
disrupt an opposition rally in Yerevan on April 5. Police at the scene looked on
as they attacked journalists and smashed cameras that filmed their actions.


Manucharian is believed to be the unofficial leader of the Intellectual Forum, a
non-governmental organization that has backed the Armenian opposition's campaign
of street protests against President Robert Kocharian.

By Karine Kalantarian


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1771

    c. Media Groups Slam Government Over ‘Unpunished’ Attacks On Journalists

[29.06.2004]

Armenia’s leading media associations demanded on Tuesday that the authorities
respect freedom of speech, accusing them of failing to identify and punish the
perpetrators of unprecedented violence against journalists that covered recent
opposition demonstrations.

“We again demand respect for the public’s right to receive and the journalists’
right to spread information and prevention of any attempts to infringe on them,”
said a joint statement released by the Yerevan Press Club, the Armenian Union of
Journalists, the Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech and the Armenian branch
of the U.S. Internews organization.


The statement dismissed as a “farce” the trial earlier this month of two men who
were fined 100,000 drams ($185) each for taking part in the April 5 attack on
photojournalists present at an opposition rally in downtown Yerevan. They were
part of a larger group of burly men that tried to disrupt the protest, throwing
eggs at its organizers and setting off firecrackers. The thugs, who reportedly
work for government-connected wealthy individuals, went on to indiscriminately
smash most of the video and still cameras that caught their faces. Dozens of
police officers led by General Hovannes Varian stood by and refused to
intervene.


“Neither the investigating body nor the court showed a desire to protect the
journalists’ right to collect and disseminate information, not to mention the
fact that the imposed punishment was not commensurate with the deed,” the media
groups said.


“We expected that there will be other revelations and trials but nothing has
been done over the past period to identify the perpetrators of the other violent
acts,” they added, pointing to the beating by the police of four journalists
covering the brutal break-up of the April 12-13 protest near President Robert
Kocharian’s Yerevan residence.

One of those journalists, Hayk Gevorgian of the “Haykakan Zhamanak,” says that
Varian, who is the deputy chief of the national police service, personally stole
his camera before ordering subordinates to attack him. Gevorgian spent two weeks
recovering from severe injuries sustained during the beating. Ashot Melikian of
the Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech deplored the fact Varian has faced no
official inquiries or any disciplinary action over the allegations.

The joint statement also urged Armenian journalists to close ranks in the face
of what its signatories see as a government effort to further curb press
freedoms in the country. According to Boris Navasardian, chairman of the Yerevan
Press Club (YPC), the Armenian media community must consider violence against a
single journalist an affront to free speech.

The Armenian media’s coverage of the recent standoff between the government and
the opposition was scrutinized at a seminar held by the YPC on Tuesday. Levon
Barseghian, chairman of the Asparez Club of journalists in Armenia’s second city
of Gyumri, described it as largely “distorted,” singling out local television
stations for criticism.

“TV and radio stations seem to have an invisible bar which they are not allowed
to cross in order to speak more freely and criticize the authorities, especially
Robert Kocharian,” Barseghian told the seminar. He was particularly scathing
about the Kocharian-controlled state television’s coverage of the confrontation,
denouncing it as “adverse and disastrous.”

In Navasardian’s words, this situation makes even more urgent the reopening of
A1+, Armenia’s sole major private network that was often critical of the
authorities. A1+ was controversially forced off the air more than two years ago.
The authorities have since resisted strong international pressure for its
reopening. The continuing ban on A1+ is the main reason why the Armenian media
was recently rated “not free” by Freedom House, a New York-based human rights
group, for the second consecutive year.

Addressing the Council of Europe last week, Kocharian disputed assertions that
Armenia’s electronic have lacked diversity and pluralism since A1+’s closure and
urged the Strasbourg-based organization to remove the issue from the agenda of
its ongoing monitoring of his administration’s human rights record.

But Navasardian disagreed, saying that A1+’s return to the airwaves is “the only
chance to have an independent electronic media outlet in Armenia.” “Journalists
or a group of journalists do not have the resources and the political cover to
set up such a television channel,” he said. “That is the reason why we talk so
much about A1+.”

By Ruzanna Khachatrian


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1777

2. Parliamentary Assembly of Council of Europe

Kocharian Addresses PACE, Defends Crackdown On Opposition

[23.06.2004]

President Robert Kocharian on Wednesday strongly defended his administration’s
tough response to the opposition campaign for his resignation, dismissing it as
a manifestation of “political extremism” in a speech at the Council of Europe’s
Parliamentary Assembly (PACE).


Kocharian also indicated his displeasure with the PACE’s criticism of the
crackdown when he said that the Strasbourg-based body should not have discussed
the political confrontation in Armenia in the first place last April.


“I regret that some of our deputies drew the PACE into that discussion,” he
said. “I am convinced that the Council of Europe is not the best place to settle
scores between the government and the opposition. All of that must be done in
our own parliament.”

Kocharian again described the Armenian opposition’s push for power as an awkward
attempt to replicated neighboring Georgia’s November “Rose Revolution” welcomed
in the West. “The Armenian opposition failed to take into account the fact that
Armenia’s economy, unlike Georgia’s, is developing dynamically, its government
is quite efficient and its democratic achievements are propped up by
institutional structures, including police, which are able to maintain public
order,” he said.


In its April 28 resolution on Armenia, the PACE said that the Kocharian
government’s reaction to the opposition protests was “contrary to the letter and
the spirit” of its values. The 45-nation assembly threatened to impose sanctions
unless the authorities in Yerevan ensure citizens’ freedom of assembly, release
all individuals detained for their participation in the anti-government protests
and investigate “human rights abuses” reported during the crackdown.


Kocharian made no mention of those arrests. He instead dwelt on the heavy-handed
dispersal of the April 12-13 overnight rally near his official residence in
Yerevan. “The organizers of the action were demonstratively calling for civil
disobedience,” he said. “The police had no alternative; the law and order was
restored very quickly, without damage to the health of the participants of the
action.”


The Armenian leader, making his second appearance at the Council of Europe since
Armenia joined it in January 2001, went on to complain that the opposition
rejected his and his political allies’ offers of “dialogue.” “Those proposals
remain in force, but they must be discussed in parliament, not in the street,”
he said.

The Armenian authorities’ compliance with the resolution was discussed earlier
this week by the PACE’s Monitoring Committee. Its rapporteur on Armenia, Jerzy
Jaskiernia, is due to submit a final report on that in time for the assembly’s
next session in September. The committee has also been monitoring the
fulfillment of Armenia’s broader membership commitments to the Council of
Europe.

“Armenia has already fulfilled the vast majority of obligations assumed in
connection with its accession to the Council of Europe,” Kocharian declared,
adding that the remaining ones will be honored “by the end of this year.”
Armenia is going through “an active process of the formation of civil society,”
he claimed.

The 20-minute speech was followed by a question-and-answer session. The two PACE
parliamentarians representing the Armenian opposition boycotted the speech and
were not on hand to put questions to Kocharian. He was instead grilled by
Azerbaijani and Turkish lawmakers.

Asked by one of the Azerbaijanis if he had any role in the bitter
Armenian-Azerbaijani war, Nagorno-Karabakh’s former wartime leader replied:
“Yes, I took part in the war. My children were hiding in a basement for three
years and had no childhood. I am proud of my participation in the war and the
result which he had.”


Kocharian told another Azerbaijani parliamentarian that his country would have
regained most of its Armenian-occupied territories around Karabakh had it
accepted two international peace plans put forward in 1998 and 2001. He
reiterated the Armenian argument that Karabakh has never been part of an
independent Azerbaijani state and should remain outside Baku’s control.


By Armen Zakarian in Strasbourg


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1767

3. Freedom of Media and Broadcasting

Boris Navasardyan: A1+ issue must not be removed from pace resolutions


[28.06.2004]

President Kocharyan has come up with a proposal to sent the PACE monitoring
group to Armenia to convince PACE that the situation in media field here is not
so bad, the opposition activists are not being bared from airing their views on
TV channels and the fact of stripping A1+ TV Company from broadcasting license
doesn’t mean restriction of freedom of speech. He’s done it in a hope that the
issue will be removed from the PACE resolutions.

On Monday, Chair of Yerevan Press Club Boris Navasardyan, commenting on that,
said there was convincing evidence that the 2002 and 2003 tenders for
broadcasting frequencies had been held with the law serious violation. The A1+’s
issue must not be removed from the resolutions. Even in the event the things are
put right in media field, the A1+ TV Company’s issue must remain in the
resolutions. In his opinion, these two issues are completely separate and must
not be lumped together.

“As a rule, monitoring held amid political tension produces is more effective.
Different organisations having conducted monitoring during the 2003 elections on
Armenia noticed biased stance shown by leading media outlets in covering them.

It laid grounds for saying Armenian faced serious problems related to freedom of
speech. Air availability for the opposition is one of freedom of speech
criteria. But there are other criteria. It is very important how media outlets
cover social and political developments”, Navasardyan said.

He thinks, measuring duration of air-time or space in newspapers given to the
opposition activists is only one part of monitoring.

Methodology of monitoring in calm political situation should be completely
different: it should show the media whole activity at the certain period of
time, Navasardyan said.


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1776

4. Freedom of Information

The Suit of “Investigative Journalists” Versus the Yerevan Municipality
Refused


[24.06.2004]

On June 21 the court of primary jurisdiction of Center and Nork-Marash
communities of Yerevan refused the suit of “Investigative Journalists” public
organization and its chairman Edik Baghdasarian versus Yerevan Municipality. As
it has been reported, Edik Baghdasarian demanded to be given access to the
resolutions of the city administration, passed in 1997-2003, on the
constructions made in the green zone around the building of the National Opera
and Ballet Theater. At the previous session of June 9 the respondent admitted
that the municipality “was late” with the answer and asked the plaintiff to
specify what information exactly was needed. Having received a written inquiry
from the latter, the respondent petitioned the court to provide time to prepare
the information requested (see YPC Weekly Newsletter, June 4-10, 2004).

However, at the session of June 21 the representative of the municipality
submitted to the court a letter, signed on June 16 by a head of an appropriate
division of the city administration. The letter informed that “Investigative
Journalists” must be even more specific as to which “subjects” are of interest
to them. On her behalf, the judge noted that the organization should have
gathered information from other institution, such as the State Real Estate
Cadastre Committee and only afterwards, having exhausted all the possibilities,
address the municipality. Eventually the suit was refused.

“Investigative Journalists” intend to challenge this decision with the RA Court
of Appeals.


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1774

5. Freedom of Expression and Privacy

“Freedom of Expression and the Right to Respect fro Private Life” Seminar


[24.06.2004]

On June 23-24 in Tsaghkadzor “Freedom of Expression and the Right to Respect fro
Private Life” seminar was held. The event was organized by Yerevan Press Club,
the Media Division of the Directorate of Human Rights of the Council of Europe
and “Femida” NGO. The seminar brought together representatives of public, also
journalistic organizations, media, executive and judicial powers of Armenia, the
Council of Europe, international structures. At the opening of the seminar the
RA Deputy Minister of Justice Ashot Abovian, the Spokesman of the RA Ministry of
Foreign Affairs Hamlet Gasparian and the Administrative Officer of the Media
Division of the CE General Directorate of Human Rights Charlotte de Broutelle.


A presentation on the Council of Europe standards regarding freedom of
information and the respect for private life was made by a barrister of Matrix
Chambers of London Hugh Tomlinson. The Chairman of the Civil Cases Chamber of
the RA Court of Cassation Arman Mkrtumian told how the Armenian legislation
protects privacy, whereas the head of “Femida” NGO Julietta Amirkhanian
described the Armenian court precedents related to interference with privacy.


The second part of the seminar was devoted to media self-regulation issues. The
limits to freedom of expression in the context of privacy protection were
defined by the Legal Expert of Internews Armenia public organization Olga
Safarian. YPC Expert Mesrop Harutiunian spoke about the link of the between the
legal and ethical norms of privacy protection. The experience of media
self-regulation in other CE member countries, by the example of the United
Kingdom and Bosnia and Herzegovina was presented by a member of UK Press
Complaint Commission, the Chairman of the Media Council of Bosnia and
Herzegovina Robert Pinker.


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1772

6.Trafficing Issues

OSCE Conducts Training For Armenian NGOs' Experts and Interviewers


[28.06.2004]

The OSCE Office in Yerevan has invited an international expert to conduct
three-day training for experts and interviewers from two local NGOs  the
Armenian Sociological Association (ASA) and the Armenian Relief Society (ARS).
During the training the expert will concentrate on best practices in trafficking
in persons (TIP) research and will conduct a training methodology session with
training-of-trainers component.

ASA and ARS, both with an extensive experience in sociological research, are
presently conducting a comprehensive sociological survey on trafficking in
persons in Armenia. The OSCE Office Yerevan supports this endeavor with
technical expertise. The survey is financed by the US State Department.


"This sociological survey is the most comprehensive one in the field of
trafficking undertaken in Armenia so far. There is disturbing anecdotal evidence
about Armenia being both the country of origin and transit, however there is no
actual data about the scope of the problem. The project's objective is to close
this gap. The results of the survey will be shared with state authorities, the
civil society and international actors, and should serve as a basis for future
policy design and interventions," says Blanka Hancilova, Democratisation Officer
with the OSCE Office Yerevan.

An international expert from Italian Prosecutor's Office will join the team in
September for several weeks to introduce best international practices. The
result of their work and cooperation with the government, especially with the
Ministry of Justice and the Prosecutor's Office, will enhance victim and witness
protection. This will contribute to the effective criminalization of trafficking
as well as of corruption and other organized crime.


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1770

7.Workshops and conferences

Globalverkstan - International Project Management for NGOs


[24.06.2004]

"Globalverkstan" ("the global workshop") is a three semester educational
programme for practitioners and managers in the Global Civil Society.

Globalverkstan invite participants (students) who have experience of
non-governmental organisations; human rights, development, culture and art,
journalism (mainstream or alternative), from anywhere on earth.

In terms of content, the major subjects are:

Project management, economics and marketing, writing and presenting results,
evaluation in theory and practice, theoretical studies in democracy,
globalisation and its discontents, and critical studies in non-democratic
organisations operating in civil society. One of the semesters you will take
part in active workplace learning. The civil society perspective will be the
mainstreaming element of the programme.

Globalverkstan is located in Göteborg, Sweden. Next programme is scheduled to
begin in January 2005.

Globalverkstan is part of Nätverkstan, a non-profit organisation in Göteborg.

More information and application:

www.globalverkstan.net


http://new.csi.am/eng/index1.php?goto=news&id=1769