The regular working meeting of the Government-Civil Society Anti-Corruption Dialogue was held on 8 December

Mr. Karen Zadoyan, AYLA President, Coordinator of the CSO’s Anti-Corruption Coalition Secretariat in his speech referred to Article 410 of the Draft RA Criminal Code (Illicit Enrichment), which provides:

«1. Illicit Enrichment: Significant increase in income or property of the official or significant expenditures by an official, which is not based on his legitimate income, is punished with imprisonment for the term of 5 to 10 years.

2. The act envisaged in part 1 of this Article, committed by a high ranking official is punished with imprisonment for the term of 6 to 12 years.”

Karen Zadoyan said that according to the Draft the burden of proof falls on the State, which may be ineffective. “By putting the burden of proof only on the state, we shall have no progress, because the institute of illegal enrichment is a consequential corpus delicti,” said the rapporteur.

Why is it consequential corpus delicti? Mr. Zadoyan explained that illicit enrichment is a result of a number of corruption related offences. For example the public official abuses his powers, takes bribes and those crimes are not discovered, and as a result the official enriches himself illegally.

“Article 410 of the Draft Code provides that the State bears the burden of proof in case where the corpus delicti of “illicit enrichment” occurs. But if the government, through its relevant agencies could, then it would have revealed the mentioned crimes of the official; abuse of power, taking bribe (since the government bears the burden of proof for these offences) rather than the illicit enrichment, which is the consequence of the mentioned offences. In this case, the official who is accused of illicit enrichment should bear the burden of proof. This is not just our belief, but is the requirement of Article 20 of the UN Convention against Corruption. Article 410 of the Draft Criminal Code in the current formulation is far from being a complete description of this corpus delicti. It cannot have any significant result. In this way, we shall just have a smokescreen in our country that illicit enrichment has been criminalized,” Mr. Zadoyan said.

“The fight against corruption is one of the priorities of our country,” Mr. Bagrat Ghazinyan, Head of the Department of the Development of the Legislation and Legal Analysis at the Ministry of Justice of Armenia said.

“Adequate legislative level which will enable to ensure the adequate level of the struggle has a primary role as well. In this relation, it is important to note that the Ministry of Justice and CSO conduct active steps in the scope of their cooperation and develop legislative acts,” he said.

The topic of discussion was criminalization of illicit enrichment and the introduction of this institute in our country.

Mr. Carl Ulbricht, International Expert of ‘Multi-faceted Anti-Corruption Promotion” project spoke about the provision of criminalization of illicit enrichment in the RA, the importance of criminalization of illicit enrichment and the problems. He noted the importance of creation of the independent anti-corruption body, which will coordinated the issues related to illicit enrichment.

Speakers’ presentations were followed by a discussion.

The “Multi-Faceted Anti-Corruption Promotion” is implemented by the “Armenian Young Lawyers Association” NGO and the partner organization “Freedom of Information Center” NGO. Today’s discussion was organized in cooperation with the RA Ministry of Justice. The “Multi-Faceted Anti-Corruption Promotion” is funded by the European Union and co-funded by the OSCE Office in Armenia.

Iravaban.net