It is a difficult time. What should have been an act of public courage is instead being viewed as an expedient political maneuver.
Most of those arrested and charged with involvement in the public events on and around March 1 and the violence which followed have been released. This would have been welcome, had it taken place in April last year, immediately upon the President’s inauguration. It did not. President Sargsyan took no such step.
Such a step would have been welcome anytime during this difficult, polarized, tense year. It did not happen. President Sargsyan did not resort to declaring amnesty until ‘the public urged him to do so.’ This pretense at public responsiveness came days after a disputed mayoral election, and days before another Council of Europe hearing on Armenia’s democratization processes.
That hearing was to focus specifically on the political environment which followed presidential elections whose results were disputed by large numbers of the public. The amnesty decision passed the Parliament just days before the long-outstanding trials which by all appearances were artificially dragged out, were abruptly brought to an end. In fact, so abruptly, that the trials’ conclusion, the defendants’ convictions, their sentencing and the amnesty decision all took place in less than a full court day.
Instead of rule of law, we seem to have rule of convenience. In fact, so much so, that it is difficult to find answers to all the questions that have arisen as a result of these amnesty decisions. Why, for exampe, does amnesty not apply for the jailed editor of the opposition newspaper, Jamanak? He has served most of his three-year sentence after having been detained for indeed violating the law on military service. The problem is that he is neither the first nor only such offender, and therefore, the political implications of his detention continue to hurt the country’s image and standing.
There are more questions. But detention of journalists, especially editors, is damaging to the democratic transformation we say we aspire to. It does not matter that there are other editors at other opposition newspapers still working. On the contrary, in this kind of uncertain environment, those other editors will work under more polarized, more extreme politicized conditions, and will do what they must to protect their political rights, rather than serve the public’s right to honest, fair, comprehensive information, which should be their first responsibility.