Europe in Law Association NGO finds that the competition of selecting candidates for Armenia`s judge at the European Court of Human Rights the principles of justice and transparency have not been observed.
Member of this NGO Advocate Tigran Yegoryan reminded that analyzing the registry and other documents they came to the conclusion that 3 of the candidates, including Armen Harutyunyan should have withdrawn their candidacies, which we have already announced.
Mr Yegoryan also referred to one of the candidates winning the competition, namely Armen Harutyunyan. “He applied late. In the registry we also see the names of Arayik Melkumyan and Nora Karapetyan after the registration of Armen Harutyunyan, and it is stated that they have also sent their applications via post. The issue of these 2 candidates has been solved, they have just been removed from the list. But Armen Harutyunyan`s case was solved right in the opposite way”.
Then he spoke about the oral interviews. “Considering the fact that there were doubts of clash of interests with candidates with regard to some of the Commission members, it is necessary that the grades by some of the Commission members are published within the framework of transparency principle. This would clarify for the public the criteria through which the Commission members were doing their evaluations. Gagik Harutyunyan announced during this phase that an application was received from one of the candidates which also put into doubt the objective evaluation of certain Commission members. In these conditions the Commission should have published the evaluation of each of teh Commission members”.
As to the evaluation of language skills, the Member of Europe in Law Association said: “This procedure was not exclusively regulated. Some of the candidates were reading part of the texts and were doing not complete translations”. “The Commission members did not have the translated versions of those texts and so could not understand the correctness of the translations right on spot”.
