YEREVAN. – I once said that I am generally surprised why Article 213 of the Constitution, which is included in the transitional provisions, can be amended by both the National Assembly and the referendum because the article is entirely about the head of the judiciary, and it would be logical that the same rules that apply to the change of the head of the judiciary would apply to it. Vladimir Vardanyan, majority My Step faction MP and chairman of the Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs of the National Assembly of Armenia, stated this in a talk with journalists in parliament Wednesday, referring to the video of his speech, which has been put into circulation these days.

"It is not a question of terminating the powers [of the serving judges of the Constitutional Court], but of ensuring the existence of judges endowed with a single, single-gender status," he said, in particular.

Vardanyan added that they had applied to the Venice Commission, and that the latter had found that the respective transition period was too long, that Article 213 of the Constitution had not exhausted itself and was subject to amendment.

And to the remark that several judges of the Constitutional Court had announced that they would appeal and reach all the way to the ECHR, the ruling bloc MP responded as follows:. "It’s everyone’s the right to—by exhausting domestic measures of protection—apply to international tools of protection, including the ECHR. But in my view, threaten that ‘We will apply to the ECHR’ is unacceptable. If the ECHR finds a violation, Armenia will be obliged to eliminate that violation.”