The 2015 competition for ECHR judges was held with violations, considers Advocate Lusine Abrahamyan, the representative of Europe in Law Association.

Today, during the meeting with the journalists Ms Hakobyan reminded that the RA President had directly canceled his previous decision, which referred to the election of the judges and announced a new contest. She said that according to the rule, the competition was held in two phases, documentation testing phase and the phase of the interview. However, in the first phase the public was deprived of the opportunity of viewing documents, the committee sessions were closed, “It is not known how the experts were selected? How the interview was conducted? What were the tests, and how were they made?” Ms Hakobyan said.

Advocate Mushegh Shushanyan said that the competition could not have been held in a fair and transparent manner, as the commission was composed by the President’s decree of August 2, and after getting acquainted with the composition of the staff it became clear that the staff would apparently dependent of the state. “The Committee was composed of 9 members, and in 8 cases there were serious grounds to consider that they were not politically neutral and could be dependent from the RA President and the executive branch,” said the advocate.

Mr. Shusahnyan said that they were not assigned according to their knowledge and there was no explanation as to why these people were elected as a committee member. According to the lawyer, the goal was not to conduct a transparent and fair contest contests and in both their authorized persons were elected.

Advocate Lusine Sahakyan said that during the competition, committee members were regularly absent and did not attend the candidates interviewed, but they had rated them. In addition during the interview, no in-depth questions were asked, and there were a lot of questions that they did not have the right to ask. “It was not clear what scores were given. The Committee members did not disclose their assessments. The evaluation sheets were not publicized.”

Advocate Tigran Yegoryan informed that their report was sent to the relevant bodies of the Council of Europe and urged to carefully review all of the facts and documents submitted by the Government.

Yelena Aramyan

Iravaban.net