{"id":249404,"date":"2014-02-23T14:47:02","date_gmt":"2014-02-23T10:47:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=249404"},"modified":"2014-02-23T14:48:12","modified_gmt":"2014-02-23T10:48:12","slug":"court-rejects-art-activist-groups-lawsuit-against-armenian-police","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2014\/02\/23\/court-rejects-art-activist-groups-lawsuit-against-armenian-police.html","title":{"rendered":"Court Rejects Art-Activist Group&#8217;s Lawsuit Against Armenian Police"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\t<span style=\"line-height: 1.6em;\">The Administrative Court of the Republic of Armenia (RA) rejected the lawsuit of four members of the artist-activist group <em>Art Laboratoria<\/em> (&quot;art lab&quot;) against the RA Police. The artist-activists were asking the court to annul RA Police Arabkir Division Chief Grisha Amirkhanyan&#39;s December 2013 decision to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/en\/2013\/12\/14\/art-group-did-not-harm-anothers-property-artists-to-appeal-in-court.html\"><span style=\"color:#0000CD;\"><strong>fine them each 30,000 AMD<\/strong><\/span><\/a> (about $75 USD) for<strong> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/en\/2013\/11\/11\/police-detain-artists-for-4-hours-for-graffiti-portrait-of-shant-harutyunyan-video.html\"><span style=\"color:#0000CD;\">stencilling on the walls of Armenia&#39;s National Assembly<\/span><\/a><\/strong> on Nov. 10, 2013, the portrait of Shant Harutyunyan, a political activist detained during clashes with police in Yerevan on Nov. 5, 2013.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe court justified its decision by claiming it received the suit two days late. That the delay was due to the postal service delivery, the court didn&#39;t consider a valid excuse.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tThe artist-activists&#39; representative, Helsinki Association for Human Rights attorney Gayane Khachatryan, speaking to Epress.am, said: &quot;The court could have recognized as valid the two days missed of the judicial deadline for launching a lawsuit, as it occurred as a result of the postal service&#39;s late delivery of the return notice receipts. But the administrative court invoked the Jan. 7, 2014 decision of the RA Constitutional Court&#39;s no-longer-valid RA Administrative Procedure Code, explaining that it wasn&#39;t obliged to append to the suit evidence attesting to receiving the defendants&#39; claim. Meanwhile, that procedure is provided in the code that entered into force in January this year, and the RA Constitutional Court&#39;s ruling is not applicable with respect to the new code.&quot;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tAccording to her, the legislator allowed for a violation from the start, since adopting a new administrative procedure code, it ignored the RA Constitutional Court&#39;s ruling. Also, a need arose for the RA Constitutional Court to adopt a new ruling that will be applicable with respect to the existing code.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tA complaint against the Administrative Court ruling has been submitted to the Court of Appeals<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Administrative Court of the Republic of Armenia (RA) rejected the lawsuit of four members of the artist-activist group Art Laboratoria (&#8220;art lab&#8221;) against the RA Police.<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":245395,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[20008,20009,51376],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249404"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=249404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/249404\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/245395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=249404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=249404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=249404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}