YEREVAN, APRIL 29, ARMENPRESS. Caretaker Justice Minister of Armenia Rustam Badasyan answered to the questions of ARMENPRESS regarding whether Nikol Pashinyan can be considered as caretaker prime minister after resigning from the position and is there a legal opportunity for replacement?

-Mr. Badasyan, after the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan aimed at triggering snap parliamentary elections, the discourse whether he can continue serving as caretaker PM or not still continues. After all, is there a concrete response to this question?

Of course, there is, but the discourse is highly artificial. After resigning the prime minister, as well as the other members of the Cabinet continue fulfilling their duties before the formation of a new Cabinet. In particular, according to Article 158 of the Constitution of Armenia, the government is submitting its resignation to the President also when the prime minister resigns. According to that same Article, the Cabinet members continue fulfilling their duties before the formation of a new Cabinet. And the composition of the Cabinet members is defined already by Article 147 according to which the government is composed of the prime minister, deputy prime ministers and ministers.

-Different parallels are drawn between the resignation cases of Serzh Sargsyan and Nikol Pashinyan in 2018. Is there a difference between these two resignation processes?

-Look. On April 23, 2018, a decision was adopted by the government according to which the government, based on the respective regulations of the Law on Composition and Activity of Government and the resignation of Prime Minister Serzh Sargsyan, decided to state the impossibility of Serzh Sargsyan’s fulfilling his powers.

At that moment, in the absence of incumbent prime minister and the impossibility of fulfillment of powers, according to the government’s decision defining the procedure of replacement of PM, Serzh Sargsyan has been replaced by first deputy prime minister Karen Karapetyan because of the impossibility of the fulfillment of duties by the PM. In other words, leaving aside the grounds of impossibility, in this case the issue of applicability or non-applicability, it has been, in fact, stated by the decision of the previous government that PM’s resignation doesn’t exclude him from fulfilling his duties, and a necessary act is needed to replace Serzh Sargsyan with Karen Karapetyan.

Moreover, when Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan resigned on October 16, 2018, he continued fulfilling his duties before the formation of a new government in 2019.

In other words, not only the aforementioned Articles of the Constitution clearly define this issue, but also there has never been another perception over this matter.

-Let’s imagine that the PM doesn’t continue fulfilling his duties after resignation. In that case is there a legal opportunity for replacement?

-Thank you for a good question. Let’s imagine that the PM should not continue fulfilling his duties after his resignation, until the new Cabinet is formed, in that case where is his replacement procedure? Such a procedure, moreover, should have been defined exclusively by the Constitution, because, in fact, we are talking about the constitutional security component. According to the decision of the government as I mentioned above, there are replacement procedures for the PM only in the cases of the absence of the PM and the impossibility of fulfilling duties by him, but none of this includes the case of resignation of the PM.

Those people, who claim that only the prime minister cannot continue fulfill the duties of the PM before the formation of a new Cabinet, in fact, claim that Armenia must not have a head of an executive branch before the formation of a new Cabinet, and I think that we all understand the absurdity of such claim.

Editing and Translating by Aneta Harutyunyan