The Armenian Lawyers Association is implementing a monitoring process, which also monitors the judicial and legal reforms strategy for 2022-2026 and the action plan adopted within its framework. Karen Zadoyan, President of the ALA, told Iravaban.net about this.

According to the program, it is planned to implement fact-finding activities using transitional justice tools to identify systematic human rights violations, and two actions are envisaged under this goal:

• 1st is the development of a legislative package for the fact-finding group,
• 2nd is its implementation.

“The main goal is to achieve 4 sub-goals: first, the implementation of criminal justice, second, the search for and disclosure of truth, third, the implementation of compensation, and fourth, the implementation of systemic institutional reforms. It can be said that these 4 sub-goals are included in the second goal of our strategy, but including such a goal must have its prerequisites,” said ALA President Karen Zadoyan.

According to our interlocutor, back in 2019, the Armenian Lawyers Association conducted a study and presented it to the Government, the National Assembly, international and local stakeholders, and also organized an expert workshop on transitional justice: “In 2019, hearings on transitional justice were organized in the National Assembly, where I was one of the 3 main speakers and reported on behalf of civil society about the possibility of applying transitional justice in Armenia.”

According to him, there must be reliable mechanisms for transitional justice strategic actions that have not been implemented on time, and there has been no fact-finding commission.

The draft law on making changes and additions to the Public Council has been adopted since January 2025.

“The law ‘On the Public Council’ sets a mandatory condition that the Public Council should be formed after the parliamentary elections. Unfortunately, after the last parliamentary elections, it was not formed, this requirement of the law was not fulfilled, and currently the formation of the council is being carried out only with an actual violation of the law,” said Karen Zadoyan, noting that there has been a violation of the fundamental principles of council formation.

“Unfortunately, this fundamental principle has been violated, and the 15 commission members who were supposed to be elected during meetings convened by sectoral professional organizations and groups, of course, under the organization and supervision of the Prime Minister’s staff to ensure that everything was legal and fair, that provision has been changed and 15 people selected by the Prime Minister will select the other 15 people.

It turns out that we will not have commission chairpersons elected by society in compliance with the principles of self-governance, but we will have 15 people who are ‘elected,’ in reality appointed, then these 30 people will propose 30 more candidates and elect 15,” he said.

According to Karen Zadoyan, the law stipulates that the Public Council must elect a fact-finding commission consisting of 7 people, and these 7 people will elect their chairman, who will carry out the fact-finding mission without actually having the trust of society, the involvement of broad segments of society, and self-governance.

Details in the video.