I noticed that there was a certain impression that the European Court of Human Rights hadn’t touched upon the first and second questions of the Constitutional Court of Armenia and rejected them. There shouldn’t be such formulations because the first two questions concerned the requirements of the principle of legal certainty, and the ECHR had touched upon them in the third point. This is what Aram Vardevanyan, one of the attorneys of second President of Armenia Robert Kocharyan, told reporters today, touching upon the responses of the ECHR addressed to the Constitutional Court of Armenia.

According to him, the “blanket reference” is the norm that is in another document, not the Criminal Code. “For instance, take Article 300.1 of the Criminal Code, the norms of which are stated in the Constitution. The ECHR has clearly established that the “blanket reference” may be used and be lawful only if it is rather clear and foreseeable. In the case of Article 300.1, there is no clarity or foreseeability. The ECHR also underlined that the scope and volume of the act that is deemed to be a crime must be clear, but Article 300.1 doesn’t meet this requirement either,” the attorney said.

Touching upon the issue of retroactivity, he said the following: “If the ECHR hadn’t seen a problem, it would simply state that there is no problem. When the ECHR analyzes an issue and with such an extensive document, this means that there is a problem. If there was no problem, the ECHR wouldn’t even accept it for proceedings. This decision is a rather helpful decision in which the part about retroactivity clearly states that a more aggravating act can’t be retroactive.”