Armenia’s Justice Minister Srbuhi Galyan has rejected claims that the Ministry of Justice is drafting the new Constitution without the involvement of the Constitutional Reform Council, saying that the council has been consulted on all provisions prepared so far and has itself made decisions on much of the draft’s wording.

“We have discussed with the council members everything that has been drafted at the ministry as constitutional text up to this point. Decisions on many of the issues we discussed, including the wording to be used in the draft, were made by the council itself,” she told the journalists at the National Assembly on November 2, responding to claims that the Constitution was being drafted at her ministry while the Constitutional Reform Council was being sidelined in the process.

It should be noted that Daniel Ioannisyan, a council member and program coordinator at the Union of Informed Citizens civic organization, published a post stating that if the draft Constitution was being prepared and published by the Ministry of Justice rather than the Constitutional Reform Council, the council should be dissolved.

Galyan noted that a decision had now been made to continue working with the council. “We convened the latest meeting recently, and the questions raised by council members also concerned whether the council would assume responsibility for the text. I got the impression that our colleagues were not ready to take on that responsibility. This is about the responsibility of all colleagues, not individual responsibility. I proposed the following approach: we will continue working on the text, which will be published in the name of the Ministry of Justice, while council members, of course, will remain free to express their views on any provision.

“In this process, inclusivity is extremely important to us, and we intend to discuss every outstanding issue with the council. We have plenty of time to do so, since publication of the text does not mean that we will immediately launch an election campaign,” the minister said.