At around 6 pm yesterday, Heritage Party members wanted to erect a canopy made of tarp in Liberty Square, where party leader Raffi Hovannisian has been staging a hunger strike since Mar. 15. The police in Liberty Square, however, prohibited the act. A clash between party members, supporters and police resulted in police tearing the fabric and breaking the canopy poles.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Epress.am, Heritage Party MP Larisa Alaverdyan described how police seized the broken canopy and she, following them, arrived at the Mashtots Ave. entrance to Liberty Square, drew up a chair and sat down, holding the broken canopy to her.<\/p>\n
Alaverdyan then announced that she won’t move until a high-ranking police official comes and explains on what grounds they have not been allowed to erect the canopy and why officers broke another person’s property.<\/p>\n
“I have to repeat everything that Yerevan police chief Mr. Nersik Nazaryan told me over the phone. He said, yes, we don’t have a law which I can substantiate, but we won’t allow it. That is, legally it’s not prohibited in our legislation, but not permitting it is being characterized simply as self-will. I am a citizen of this country; I want to understand: who, without any legal basis, ordered to tear the canopy in such a brutal way, leading to material damage. I have to have that written command so that I can dispute its constitutionality and legislation in court. It’s possible that in Armenia the time has come when this is the norm,” she said.<\/p>\n
Note, about two hours after the incident, an investigator came to Liberty Square and handed a written account of the incident to Alaverdyan, which police have kept a record of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
At around 6 pm yesterday, Heritage Party members wanted to erect a canopy made of tarp in Liberty Square, where party leader Raffi Hovannisian…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":77702,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[12075,12351,15118,12077],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77744"}],"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=77744"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77744\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77702"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77744"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77744"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77744"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}