Nikol Pashinyan’s congratulatory address on Constitution Day

YEREVAN, JULY 5, ARMENPRESS. Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan sent a congratulatory message on the occasion of Constitution.

The message reads as follows:

“Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,

today, July 5, we celebrate Constitution Day. The Constitution is also called the mother law or basic law. It is called a mother law, because in any country where there is a Constitution, laws must flow from it, be nourished by theses, concepts and provisions of the Constitution.

The constitution is called the mother law because in democratic countries it is the only or one of the few laws that is usually adopted by popular vote, in this case the people vote “for” or “against” the law, it is the people who accept or reject this fundamental law by voting law - the Constitution.

Similar legal norms are in force in the Republic of Armenia, that is, in our country, the role of creator of the Constitution is the collective of citizens, the people. Why is this so and what is the logic behind it? By adopting the Constitution and voting for the Constitution, the citizen and the collective of citizens, the people, first of all, declare that they take responsibility for having a state and are ready to bear this responsibility.

And in the text of the Constitution itself, the people express their idea of ​​how they imagine this state, its governance, what it should be like as a whole, and what project we will all be working on to implement.

And the third, no less important circumstance is that citizens must fix in the text of the Constitution the rules of their life in the state they founded and built: the rules of citizen-state relations, the rules of citizen-law relations, the rules of citizen-citizen relations, the rules of human relations, rules of man-nature relations.

Accordingly, the Constitution is a collective agreement of citizens on the rules of life, rights and responsibilities in force in their own country. The word “sovereign,” dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia, comes from here. The sovereign is the one who himself sets the rules of life in a given country. In our country, the sovereign is the people, and this is so not only de jure, but after the People's Nonviolent Velvet Revolution of 2018 also de facto. And our current Constitution is in deep socio-psychological conflict with this fact.

Due to circumstances known to all of us, a citizen of the Republic of Armenia today does not believe that the Constitution expresses his ideas and agreements on the rules of his life with his neighbor, with his community, with other residents of his state. The citizen believes that the ruling elite created this text, announced its adoption and, in fact, introduced it in Armenia.

I was and remain convinced that this is a fundamental problem for our country, and our country needs a new Constitution, and now I am talking not so much about a new text, but about a new method of creating and enacting it. We need a new Constitution so that the people believe that it was he who created it, it was he who adopted it, and what is written in it is his idea of ​​the state he created and the relations between people, citizens in this state.

We need a Constitution that will be organically connected with the creator of the Constitution - with the people.

There is now a lot of discussion around this topic both within the country and abroad. However, we must steadily continue the path of strengthening our state - the Republic of Armenia, and make it invulnerable in institutional, psychological and physical terms. This is a difficult but honorable path, and we are on the right path, however, in order to go this path, we need to focus on a specific task: to serve the state interest of the Republic of Armenia, because the state interest of the Republic of Armenia is the interest of the sovereign, that is, the people of the Republic of Armenia , the interest of Real people living in Real Armenia, who created the Republic of Armenia as a tool to ensure their freedom, well-being, happiness, security, to create a fair environment on their internationally recognized territory, and we must not deviate from this goal.

Dear people, dear citizens of the Republic of Armenia,

Happy Constitution Day to all of us!

Glory to the fallen heroes, and long live the Republic of Armenia!”