Epress.am News from Armenia
Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg presented his 2010 annual activity report to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) yesterday. Local daily Aravot (“morning”) reports that the first person to ask him a question was PACE Monitoring Co-Rapporteur on Armenia John Prescott, who asked whether, in his report on Armenia, he will address the issue of the victims of the events of Mar. 1, 2008.
Recall on Mar. 1, 2008, national police and military forces were called in to disperse mass protests following disputed presidential elections and used “excessive force and violence” which resulted in 10 dead and many more wounded.
“The report is not yet published,” responded Hammarberg. “And it’s obvious that we will address the investigation into the deaths of the 10 people.”
Later, Heritage Party MP Zaruhi Postanjyan, a member of Armenia’s delegation to PACE, passed on material to Hammarberg on incidents of attacks against the opposition in the past 2 months: the case of Samson Khachatryan, the altercation between police and Heritage Party MPs outside the government building on Mar. 3, and the case against her brother.
Prosperous Armenia MP Naira Zohrabyan, another Armenian PACE delegate, then asked, “Recently Azerbaijan threatened to bomb civil aircraft flying in Nagorno-Karabakh. This is nothing if not a state terrorism threat. Aren’t you preparing, as Human Rights Commissioner, to respond to them?”
Hammarberg responded that he was very concerned on both the Nagorno-Karabakh issue as well as the tension between Armenia and Azerbaijan, but in this matter, he doesn’t want to compete with the OSCE Minsk Group, reports Aravot.