Wednesday, July 31 2013

Zaruhi Postanjyan, member of the PACE Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination, has applied to the PACE leadership to take immediate measures to bring Acting Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin to responsibility for extension of xenophobia and racism and to start investigating the fact of denigration of Hrachya Harutyunyan's honor and dignity by the legal structures and representatives of medical institutions, who had invested Harutyunyan with a housecoat before taking him to the court. 

In her open letter to CoE Secretary General Thorbjorn Jagland, as well as to the heads of a number of PACE structures and Chairperson of the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance Eva Smith, Postanjyan speaks of the violation of rights of Armenian citizen Hrachya Harutyunyan, who was arrested following the 13 July 2013 tragic road accident in Russia. Postanjyan thinks that after the incident Acting Mayor of Moscow Sergey Sobyanin made a statement on the use of discrimination against foreign citizens.   

She says that the tragic accident killed 18 people and wounded dozens of people. Hrachya Harutyunyan, the driver of the defective Kamaz owned by a private company, also received bodily injuries and was taken to court and arrested immediately without being provided medical aid. At the moment he is in the hospital of the Matrosskaya Tishina detention unit, she says.   

Postanjyan is convinced that no such tragic incident might have occurred if the Russian Federation, a member of the Council of Europe, were not one of the most corrupt countries. And if racism and xenophobia are added to the countrywide corruption in Russia, it becomes obvious that not only the precedence of law, but also the right to life and dignity of the citizens of other nationalities of the multi- ethnic Russian Federation are threatened, Postanjyan stresses.

Zaruhi Postanjyan also asks her colleagues to urge Russia to take immediate measures to bring Olga Skobeyeva, a journalist of Rossiya-1, to responsibility for her insulting remarks against Hrachya Harutyunyan and violation of assumption of innocence, as well as to start investigating the fact of denigration of Hrachya Harutyunyan's honor and dignity by the relevant legal structures and representatives of medical institutions.