Armenian Opposition Groups Ask Constitutional Court to Overturn Election Results

YEREVAN — Four opposition groups that participated in Armenia’s recent parliamentary elections appealed to the Constitutional Court on Friday to overturn the results of last month’s elections, which they lost to acting Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party.

The separate appeals were lodged by the alliances led by former Presidents Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian and two smaller groups that failed to win any seats in the Armenian parliament. They claimed to have submitted evidence of irregularities which seriously affected the outcome of the June 20 elections.

A spokesman for Kocharian’s Hayastan bloc, Aram Vardevanyan, again accused Pashinyan of abusing his government levers, bullying opposition activists and resorting to “hate speech” during the election campaign and forcing military and security personnel to vote for the ruling Civil Contract party.

Vardevanyan said Hayastan’s appeal to the court includes video material and documentary evidence of fraud in official results from 109 precincts where 88,000 Armenians cast ballots on election day. He said the bloc also found discrepancies in documents used during voting in three dozen other precincts.

The CEC rejected on June 27 Hayastan’s and Pativ Unem’s demands to annul the vote results, saying that the opposition blocs failed to present evidence of widespread fraud.

International observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) said the elections were competitive and generally well-managed.

Eoghan Murphy, head of the OSCE/ODIHR election observation mission in Armenia, told RFE/RL last month that violations and incidents witnessed during the elections did not impact the validity of their results.

“It was a competitive election. People could campaign freely. Candidates were able to go and organize events, and they organized events,” Murphy said.

One of Pashinian’s associates, Alen Simonyan, dismissed the opposition appeals to the Constitutional Court as publicity stunts aimed at tarnishing the legitimacy of the ruling party’s victory.

Under Armenian law, the court has to examine the appeals and rule on them within the next 15 days.

In case of agreeing to annul the official results, the court could order the holding of new elections or a second round of voting or change the CEC’s distribution of the new parliament’s 107 seats.

Using a complex legal formula, the CEC has given 71 parliament seats to Pashinian’s party and 29 seats to Kocharian’s bloc. The other opposition force is to get the remaining 7 seats.

Four of the Constitutional Court’s nine judges were installed by the outgoing parliament controlled by Pashinian.

Hayastan’s Vardevanian demanded that one of those judges, Vahe Grigorian, recuse himself from the case. He said Grigorian cannot make impartial decisions because of having represented relatives of protesters killed during Kocharian’s rule in a high-profile trial of the ex-president.