The Competition for selection of Armenia`s judge at the European Court of Human Rights went on in a tense atmosphere. Member of the Commission and Rector of the RA Academy of Justice Ruben Melikyan states that the process was transparent.
According to Mr Melikyan the announcements and raising of certain issues by the “Europe in Law Association” NGO had certain consequences for the Competition Commission. “As the Commission developed its agenda based on certain conditions raised and justified by the civil society”.
Refering to the documents issue of Armen Harutyunyan, Arayik melkumyan and Nora Karapetyan, the Commission member said: “We had 3 candidates whose cases differed. For one candidate there were postal documents, for the others – not. The explanation here is that they did not pass the documents to the head of respective division accepting them”.
As to Armen Harutyunyan`s case, our interlocutor mentioned. “It was without doubts that this candidate`s package of documents has been handed over to the postal office on 23 September. According to the electronic follow-up service, the documents should have been received by latest not at 18:45 on 24 September, but at 10:04 in the morning. In this case the candidate could not have been unlawfully left out of the competition”.
Mr Melikyan reminded that the deadline for application submissions has been set at 18:00 by the Commission and not by the RA President. “And the Commission itself clarified that the deadline was only for those citizens who hand their applications by themselves, and not for the postal-service applications. The framework of post officers` predictability is out of the context, and the candidates using their services do not have to follow their activities”.
Refering to the stage of language conduct and the presence of translated texts with the Commission, Mr Melikyan said. “We did not have the texts at that moment, but we had them during the evaluation process. As provided by the order, we were doing our evaluations based on the expert evaluations. Language experts formed a special conclusion, where they mentioned all the drawbacks, and based on those opinions the Commission members implemented the evaluation”, concluded Mr Melikyan.
