YEREVAN — The National Assembly voted on Wednesday to appoint Anna Vardapetyan as Armenia’s next Prosecutor General. She was voted in unanimously by 70 of the 107 Members of Parliament participated in the voting. The two opposition factions were absent from the sitting.
The current prosecutor-general, Artur Davtyan, will complete his six-year term in office on September 15. He was appointed in 2016 by the country’s former parliament dominated by then President Serzh Sarkisian’s loyalists.
Anna Vardapetyan, served as a deputy minister of justice in 2019 and became PM Nikol Pashinyan’s assistant on legal affairs in March 2020.
Speaking on the parliament floor before the vote, Vardapetyan, pledged to ensure proper oversight of law-enforcement agencies combatting and investigating crimes. She said she will tackle favoritism within those agencies as well as what she called excessive delays in criminal investigations and a broader “lack of justice” in the country.
“If the prosecutor is consistent about a criminal case, the citizen will not come to the gates of the government or the National Assembly to demand a [fair] investigation of their case,” she said.
The New Prosecutor General will be sworn in and will take office on September 15.