Chairman of the Chamber of Advocates of Armenia Ara Zohrabyan posted the following on his Facebook page:

“On December 22, 2020, over 100 advocates submitted a report to the Prosecutor General of Armenia with the request to launch a criminal case in regard to the commission of a criminal act provided for by Article 299 (State treason) of the Criminal Code of Armenia. The report concerned the events which took place before, during and after the war and which prima facie attest to the possibility of state treason.

In a letter dated February 4, 2021, the Senior Investigator of the Special Investigation Service of Armenia informed that the Prosecutor General’s Office had forwarded the mentioned report to the Special Investigation Service to attach it to a criminal case launched under a particular article of the Criminal Code in regard to the interview that former head of the Military Oversight Service of the Ministry of Defense of Armenia Movses Hakobyan gave on November 19, 2020 and conduct an investigation into the circumstances referred to in the report.

According to Articles 180 (Procedure for examination of reports on crimes) and 181 (Decisions made as a result of examination of statements about crimes) of the Criminal Procedure Code of Armenia, in each case of receipt of information about a crime, one of the following decisions shall be taken within a ten-day period: 1. decision on launching a criminal case, 2. decision on rejecting institution of a criminal case, 3. decision on delivering the report according to subordination.

To date, the Chamber of Advocates hasn’t received any one of these three decisions from the Prosecutor General’s Office or Special Investigation Service.

The law doesn’t envisage a fourth path to consider a report on a crime. However, the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Special Investigation Service have chosen the fourth path, depriving us applying advocates of the right to receive any one of the three decisions.

The First Instance Court of General Jurisdiction of Yerevan today received the appeal for disputing the inaction of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the Special Investigation Service. The Court will examine the appeal within a ten-day period.”