Member of the Doughty Street Chambers of England, the Queen’s barrister Edward Fitzgerald commented on the ECHR advisory opinion in the case of Armenian second president Robert Kocharyan.

According to him, the advisory opinion of the ECHR is case-law, Yerevan.Today reported.

As he noted, the advisory opinion of the ECHR has gained precedent value since in 2018, when Protocol No. 16 of the European Convention on Human Rights entered into force.

The ECHR also proposed one interesting formula: the rules that tighten the corpus delicti cannot have a retroactive effect, and this issue should be addressed based on the principle of concretization, he added.

According to him, it is noteworthy that when considering a case, the ECHR pays particular attention to the factual circumstances of a particular case and domestic judicial practice when it assesses the punishment for a committed act under the auspices of a legal norm in force at the time of committing it.