YEREVAN. – Armenia’s National Assembly (NA) Speaker Hovik Abrahamyan is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Following the well-known scandal in Strasbourg by opposition Heritage Party NA Faction Secretary Zaruhi Postanjyan who is also a member of NA delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), Abrahamyan had announced that he will remove her from the delegation.

But this plan of his cannot be implemented without noise, Zhoghovurd daily reports.  

“And, now, the [ruling Republican Party] RPA members are attempting to develop legally invulnerable mechanisms [to this end].

“Abrahamyan has assigned this job to Davit Harutyunyan, Head of the Armenian delegation to PACE, because, being the head of the delegation, he has his share of the blame in Postanjyan posing her question [to the President in Strasbourg]. 

“These days Harutyunyan is trying to come up with models toward reshaping the composition of the delegation. In response to Zhoghovurd’s query, he neither denied nor confirmed this news. He solely said no changes have yet been made in the makeup of the Armenian delegation to PACE. 

‘“I assume that yes, there will be a change, but I cannot say in what means,”’ Zhoghovurd writes.    

To note, during the question and answer session at the PACE plenary session in Strasbourg, France, on October 2, Zaruhi Postanjyan had asked Armenia’s President Serzh Sargsyan the following question:

“You have appeared here [in the PACE session] not by the will of the people, but [rather] as a consequence of organized crime, the theft of the Armenian people’s vote. Therefore you cannot de jure represent the will and right of the Armenian people. [So,] I’ll give you another question. Have you been to a casino in Europe and lost 70 million euros there? And who paid that amount in your stead?”