Epress.am News from Armenia
In 2007, by then-Yerevan Mayor Yervand Zakharyan's decision, a piece of state land in the Armenian capital's Nazarbekyan District (North-Western G-3 District) was sold through direct selling to one Eduard Hovhannisyan, whose son is an employee of the Yerevan Municipality. According to Armenian law, however, ownership of state and communal lands in the country has to be determined through an auction process. 7-8 families living in the area are currently at risk of an eviction as a result of the deal, lawyer Nona Galstyan, the families' representative, told Epress.am on Monday, October 12.
City authorities, as stated by the lawyer, have violated the citizens' pre-emptive right; that is, if a person has been cultivating a plot of land for 10 years or more, if the state wants to sell it, it first has to ask the person cultivating it whether he wants to buy it.
The affected families live in mobile homes in Nazarbekyan G-3 district. In a conversation with Epress.am they said Monday that some 10 years ago then-Ajapnyak District Head Artsrun Khachatryan promised that once these lands were subject to privatization, the residents would be able to buy them.
In 2011, however, the citizens were summoned to court and informed that the plot of land had already been sold. Four years have passed since then, and owner Eduard Hovhannisyan has been demanding throughout the entire period that the residents be evicted and the mobile homes – demolished. However, his demands have not been fulfilled since the Court of First Instance handed down a verdict in favor of the residents. Court examination findings, the lawyer said, showed that the area layout in Hovhannisyan's sale and purchase agreement did not match that of the disputed land, and it was not clear whether the mobile homes were located on the purchased area.
“In other words, either the Municipality has committed forgery or Eduard Hovhannisyan does not know what he has bought,” lawyer Galstyan noted.
Nazarbekyan resident Termine Melkumyan told our reporter that earlier this year Eduard Hovhannisyan's son visited them and said he was a Municipality employee, and that they'd win at the Court of Appeal. “That's exactly what happened on October 8 at the Court. The trial lasted for 10 minutes; the court did not examine anything and sent the case for re-investigation,” Melkumyan stated. Thus, she added, the families are once in danger of eviction.
Some of the families were given the chance to live in G-3 district since city officials deemed their previous apartment buildings unsafe. Resident Asya Hovhannisyan, for instance, received a mobile home in place of her 3-room apartment in Yerevan's 15th district.
Another mobile-home-owner Anna Hovhannisyan told our reporter that she received a residency permit in 2003: “My two sons served [in Army] border positions. [RA President] Serzh Sargsyan gave us this home to live in. We’re a family of six with two disabled members. [We’ll have nowhere to go] if they evict us.”