ArmInfo.The newly appointed Minister of Justice of Armenia, Rustam Badasyan, found out that today neither the Ministry of Justice nor the parliament has a document in the form of conceptual approaches or programmatic actions for conducting vetting. “At this stage, we are just starting work in this direction,” Badasyan said on June 27 in the government in an interview with journalists.
According to Badasyan, besides this, there are many unfinished tasks in the department headed by him. In particular, within the framework of the Istanbul Protocols (Istanbul Action Plan against Corruption), the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) made numerous proposals to Armenia, which for many years have not been implemented.
One of them, as the head of the Ministry of Justice pointed out, during the implementation could become the basis for the introduction of the institution of confiscation of property without a court decision. To recall, on May 20, in his speech on the judicial-legal system, Prime Minister of Armenia Nikol Pashinyan stated that "the time has come to conduct surgical interventions in the judicial system."
This process, as Pashinyan pointed out, should be expressed as follows: all judges in Armenia, without exception, should be subject to vetting. That is, society must have complete information about political connections, state and origin of property, previous activities, personal and professional qualities of judges. Judges on whose judgments the ECHR recorded a gross violation of rights must resign or be removed from office. And those judges who, deep down inside, know that they cannot be impartial and objective, should resign, thus serving an important service to Armenia and the Armenian people.
According to the Prime Minister, Armenia is ready for this to conduct constitutional reforms. "All this work should be carried out in cooperation with well-known international organizations operating in this field, in accordance with international best practices and in the framework of international commitments made by Armenia. We have been discussing this process with representatives of the UN, Council of Europe, EU, OSCE, IMF for a long time and the World Bank, and I hope all our international partners will support Armenia, since our goal is not to get a new puppet judicial system, but a truly independent, objective, based on the rule of law with a legal system that meets the criteria of an advanced civilized world. On this issue, we should cooperate widely with Armenian civil society, non-governmental organizations and the expert community. I want to emphasize that the time has come for clear, reliable and institutional solutions in the fight against corruption, " he stated.