Epress.am News from Armenia
No matter how much the Heritage Party along with the Armenian Revolutionary Federation (Dashnaktsutyun, or ARF-D) fought so that the Central Electoral Commission (CEC) doesn’t end up this way, the authorities are in a life buoy and so it remained the same, Heritage Party MP Armen Martirosyan, speaking about the make-up of the new CEC, told reporters in Yerevan today.
According to the opposition deputy, speaking about any independent body in Armenia today is a fairy tale. The Heritage Party proposal stated that the extra-parliamentary opposition also had to be involved in the process of forming all committees. There were going to be controllable factors, continued Martirosyan, but, as a result of dialogue, what happened was that which was supposed to have happened.
“The principle with which the current CEC has been formed, that is, the Human Rights Defender [pictured], the Court of Appeals Chamber of Advocates, it seems as though are the most independent bodies, [but] practice showed that this was all an illusion, since the Human Rights Defender specifically declared a competition and supposedly tried to create the make-up of the CEC through a competitive way, but this competition itself was a farce,” said Chamber of Advocates member and Heritage Party representative Anushavan Nikoghosyan.
Nikoghosyan also noted that the three days alloted for accepting applications for being part of the Commission were non-working days.
“This likewise, undoubtedly, I believe, would have an impact on the number of applications. Then that which everyone knows about happened: elected were two people who had previously worked with the Ombudsman in the same law firm, after which they dramatically resigned, allowing the Ombudsman to eventually nominate CEC candidates dictated by the authorities, which happened,” he said.