STEPANAKERT. - The bill of constitutional amendments will be put to vote in the National Assembly (NA) of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic (NKR/Karabakh) on January 17.

Deputy Speaker of the NKR NA, Vahram Balayan, who is also the representative of ARF Dashnaktsutyun, told the aforementioned to Armenian News – NEWS.am.

In his words, in the event the bill is approved by the parliament, the NKR President will already announce the day of the referendum. “The referendum will most likely take place next February,” he noted.

The ARF-D parliamentary faction proposed to enshrine in the Constitution a provision on that one and the same person cannot be elected as a prosecutor general and chairman of the Control Chamber more than twice, Balayan said.  

This proposal was accepted. “The preliminary version of the constitutional amendments included a provision on that the speaker and deputy speaker of the NKR NA shall not be replaced after being elected. But we said that this cannot be done, and that the NA can replace the speaker and deputy speaker of the parliament if they wish,” the Deputy Speaker stressed.

The concept paper of the Karabakh Constitution proposes shifting to the presidential form of governance. Under the current Constitution—adopted in 2006—the current form of governance in the republic is semi-presidential.