Co-founder of Legal Way NGO, lawyer Lusine Sahakyan and member of the Alternative Projects Group, lawyer Elinar Vardanyan have addressed a letter to the three factions represented in the National Assembly of Armenia with the request to undertake the initiative to establish an ad-hoc ethics committee of the National Assembly. The ground for this letter is the statement that deputy Andranik Kocharyan made on Wednesday and that contradicted the rules of ethics.

“On October 2, 2019, in an interview with 1.am news website, deputy of the My Step faction of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia Andranik Kocharyan, touching upon the criticism of former Minister of Justice of Armenia Arpine Hovhannisyan against him, declared the following: “The woman was the minister of justice of our country for a certain period. She needs to talk with facts, and she can conditionally give the names of her mother, her unknown father and others…”

In other words, in an irrelevant context, Mr. Kocharyan publicly made a judgment that Arpine Hovhannisyan’s “father is unknown”.

The day after this statement that was widely criticized by the public, when clarifying his statement for the presses, Mr. Kocharyan declared that he isn’t preparing to apologize to Arpine Hovhannisyan; moreover, he said that if Arpine Hovhannisyan’s father wants, he is willing to meet him and give the necessary clarifications. Even if we assume that, before October 2, Mr. Kocharyan didn’t know that Arpine Hovhannisyan’s father passed away a long time ago, he surely had all the reasonable opportunities to learn about this before giving public clarifications on October 3.

Taking into consideration the specific articles of Armenian legislation and the law on the guarantees for activities of deputies of the National Assembly of Armenia, we would like to ask you to exercise the right prescribed by part 2 of Article 16 of the Constitutional Law “Rules of Procedure of the National Assembly of the Republic of Armenia” and, on behalf of your faction, submit to the National Assembly the draft decision on creating an ad-hoc ethics committee to consider the issue,” the letter reads.