Prosecutor General files motion to court to exonerate two persons convicted in 2008 unrest case

YEREVAN, DECEMBER 28, ARMENPRESS. Prosecutor General Artur Davtyan has filed cassation complaints against the court sentences of Armen Avagyan and Davit Aghayan, two persons convicted in 2008 in relation to the post-election unrest in the same year.

In 2008, Avagyan was convicted to 1,6 years imprisonment. The conviction was then changed into a suspended sentence. He was found guilty in assaulting police officers. The other person, D. Aghayan, was sentenced to 5 years imprisonment for similar charges. He had appealed the verdict but it was not overruled.

The Prosecutor General’s Office said “it determined by studying the criminal case materials that during the investigation of the abovementioned cases fundamental violations of due process had taken place, and the resulting court rulings are illegal and unsubstantiated and are disrupting the very essence of justice and violated the defendants’ constitutional and convention rights to fair trial and defense”. The Prosecutor General’s Office said the court had even rejected the defense’s motion to summon witnesses and relied only on the police testimonies.

The prosecution also quoted a part from the ECHR’s judgment in the Mushegh Saghatelyan vs. Armenia case:“Their unreserved endorsementof the police version of events,failure to addressproperlyanyof the applicant’ssubmissionsand refusal to examine the defence witnesses without proper regard to the relevance of their statements can be said to have led to a limitation of the defence rights incompatible with the guarantees of a fair hearing(see,mutatis mutandis,Kasparov and Others, cited above, §66).

Edited and translated by Stepan Kocharyan