The official representative of the "Armenia" bloc—led by second President Robert Kocharyan—, constitutional expert and lawyer Aram Vardevanyan considers absurd the participation of 1,400 policemen in acting PM Nikol Pashinyan's motorcade to Syunik Province as part of his election campaign ahead of the .
"Nikol Pashinyan is not the Prime Minister at the moment, he is on leave, and the responsibilities of the Prime Minister have been assigned to one of the Deputy Prime Ministers. The question arises whether the police force should be involved in the campaign in such a way because the use of such a large force is involving them in the campaign itself.
Second, a question arises from the point of view of symmetry. There are a number of political forces participating in the campaign. How did it happen that there is nothing in terms of ensuring public order at a public rally even with the involvement of more than 50 police officers? How is it that we are always talking about the use of hundreds, already thousands of police forces? After all, there is a principle of proportionality. The police force is a structure that receives remuneration from the state budget; that is, the direction of taxes and duties paid by each of us is chosen simply to satisfy the supposed wishes of one person's campaign; this is absurd,” he told Armenian News-NEWS.am.
According to Vardevanyan, this is one of the classic examples of abuse of administrative resources because the police are not only in police uniform, but also in civilian clothes. "And this, we understand is being done to create what impression in front of the cameras. I assure that there will be certain legal processes regarding all this. I regret to state that the law enforcement has not taken any action so far," he added.
And asked why Pashinyan is going to Syunik with a motorcade, Vardevanyan said that this is done to create an atmosphere of fear. "The current and outgoing authorities do not have any trust in Syunik Province. It seems with that they want to sow a certain impression and fear. Such behavior is surprising when we know what alarming situation there is in Syunik Province at the moment in terms of border tension. A question arises: When no action is taken in such a crisis, not even a single statement is made about it, but only demarcation and delimitation are talked about, but they also leave for Syunik on a motorcade. This is a confirmation of the overall lack of sense of responsibility of these outgoing authorities," Aram Vardevanyan concluded.
