Epress.am News from Armenia
Svetlana Sargsyan, a resident of the Armenian town of Abovyan, had been receiving a survivor's pension since November, 2001, because of her son going missing during the Nagorno-Karabakh war. In 2014, however, the payment of the pension was discontinued, and Sargsyan went to Armenia's Administrative court with a claim to restore her right to the pension.
In an interview with Epress.am, Sargsyan said that on May 15, 1992, her son, Robert Mkhitaryan, volunteered to fight in Nagorno-Karabakh and has never returned. In 1997, Mkhitaryan was officially reported as missing in action by the Ministry of Defense. Based on a certificate provided by the military authority, the woman began receiving a survivor's pension in 2001.
“However, they stopped paying the pension in 2014; a criminal case was launched into an allegation that the certificate provided by the [head of the MoD department of social security of military personnel] was fake. The case was subsequently terminated because it was proved that the document was legitimate, but pension payments have yet to be restored,” Sargsyan said.
Last year, the woman appealed to Armenian Defense Minister Seyran Ohanyan with a request to restore her pension right. In a response letter to Sargsyan's request, officials said that the woman had to apply to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs since social benefits would henceforth be issued there. In addition, the Defense Ministry insisted that Sargsyan was not eligible for the survivor's pension.
On April 27, the Administrative Court, presided over by judge Karen Avetisyan, was unable to conduct a proper hearing since Manik Santrosyan, a representative for the Ministry, had come to court unprepared “due to the April events.”
“Dear Defense Ministry representative, do you think the happenings in and outside [the country] are an objective reason for your failure to get familiar with the case?” the judge asked Santrosyan as the latter failed to give full answers to the court's questions.
Nevertheless, the judge asked the MoD representative a series of questions, trying to find out why the payments of the survivor's pension were not restored after it had been proved that the MIA certificate was not fake.
“The issuance of the pension was originally a mistake. It was paid for unknown to me reasons, but a 2014 revision of the data showed that Sargsyan's case lacked an important document based on which the pension is issued. Maybe it had originally been there, but the fact is that it isn't there now, and we know nothing about it. It's a reference given by the command of the military unit about the place and time of a soldier's death,” Santrosyan told the court.
The judge asked the official how the plaintiff could have possibly obtained such a reference when her son was MIA: “How can you decide where and where a person has died when he has gone missing? How is that theoretically possible?”
Avetisyan also tried to clarify the legal basis on which Sargsyan had been deprived of the pension, to which the Defense Ministry spokesperson replied that she did not have the relevant document at that moment, but she would try to find out whether it existed when she next went to the social security department.
When the judge asked Santrosyan to name the person responsible for terminating the payments, she replied: “The payment was stopped by a head of some department at the recruiting office… I don't even know what department head that is; as far as I know, there is no such person.”
“What if it was the warehouse manager?” the judge sneered, before adjourning the hearing due to the ministry representative's inability to give coherent answers to any of the questions.
Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Tatevik Siradeghyan, the plaintiff's attorney, said that under the law, families of soldiers missing in action are entitled to a survivor's pension, and Sargsyan's son has been proven missing: “According to the MoD Commission on Prisoners of War, Hostages and Missing Persons, Mkhitaryan has been reported as missing since May 21, 1992, which is grounds for restoration of pension payments.”