{"id":274729,"date":"2016-09-15T17:40:48","date_gmt":"2016-09-15T13:40:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=274729"},"modified":"2016-09-15T18:24:24","modified_gmt":"2016-09-15T14:24:24","slug":"armenian-presidents-candidate-appointed-countrys-prosecutor-general","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2016\/09\/15\/armenian-presidents-candidate-appointed-countrys-prosecutor-general.html","title":{"rendered":"Armenian President&#8217;s Candidate Appointed Country&#8217;s Prosecutor General"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n\t<span style=\"line-height: 1.6em;\">Armenia&#39;s National Assembly voted on Thursday to appoint Artur Davtyan as prosecutor general of the country. Armenian president Serzh Sargsyan&#39;s initiative to appoint Davtyan to the post of the head of the Prosecutor General&#39;s Office was backed by 97&nbsp;MPs.<\/span>\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tArmenia&#39;s parliament spent the last 4 days discussing Davtyan&#39;s candidacy. During Wednesday&#39;s sitting, Aram Manukyan, the secretary the opposition Armenian National Congress faction, said the ANC representatives were not going to participate in the vote since they had doubts regarding Davtyan&rsquo;s fairness and impartiality as the country&rsquo;s chief prosecutor.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tNikol Pashinyan, an ANC lawmaker and a former political prisoner, for his part, wanted to find out whether the then-candidate thought there were any political prisoners or &quot;political non-prisoners&quot; in Armenia since Davtyan had said in a previous conversation with reporters that he didn&#39;t believe there were currently people in the country who had been arrested for their political views.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\t&ldquo;I mean, to become a political prisoner one must be prosecuted for political reasons and &#8211; as is my understanding &#8211; those who do not get prosecuted for these same political reasons should therefore be considered political non-prisoners; say, they have close ties with Serzh Sargsyan. So, don&#39;t you see political non-prisoners when you look at those sitting here?&rdquo; Pashinyan said, pointing to the seats occupied by members of the ruling Republican Party.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tDavtyan, however, answered that he had not changed his mind and insisted that there were indeed no political prisoners in Armenia.&nbsp;\n<\/p>\n<p>\n\tNote, over the past few years a number of local and international human rights organizations have spoken about the continued presence of political prisoners in Armenia. Shant Harutyunyan and his supporters, reserve colonel Volodya Avetisyan and anti-government activist Hayk Kyureghyan are among those who have been recognized as political prisoners by international watchdogs, local NGOs and political forces.<\/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>Armenia&#8217;s parliament spent the last 4 days discussing Davtyan&#8217;s candidacy. During Wednesday&#8217;s sitting, Aram Manukyan, the secretary the opposition Armenian National Congress faction, said the ANC representatives&#8230;<!-- 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":274722,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[11545,10341,27950,15418,13272,18289],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274729"}],"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=274729"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274729\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274722"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274729"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274729"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274729"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}