By Gevorg Tosunyan
The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) elected Vahe Grigoryan, Vice President of Armenia’s Constitutional Court, as the country’s new judge in the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) yesterday. Grigoryan’s appointment emerged from a national selection process that had been mired in controversy. The domestic phase of selection, which produced three candidates, including Nora Karapetyan and Anna Margaryan alongside Grigoryan, faced serious questions about its transparency and fairness. Legal experts and human rights advocates had raised concerns about several aspects of the selection process, from inadequately strong restrictions on having a foreign citizenship in the past to limited public access to information on candidates, as documented by CivilNet’s investigation.
All ECHR judges are elected by PACE through a two-phase process:
- National selection phase, during which each member state nominates three candidates
- Supranational selection phase, where the ECHR judge selection committee first evaluates the fairness and transparency of the national selection process (Armenia is represented on the committee by Vladimir Vardanyan, a member of the ruling Civil Contract Party). The committee then interviews each candidate, and if it determines that all conditions are met, makes a recommendation to PACE, indicating which candidate(s) they consider best fit for the job. In the final phase, PACE either elects or rejects the judge.
CivilNet documented several violations during the national selection phase:
Candidate “Filtering”
During the ECHR national selection process, the state implemented discriminatory measures regarding citizenship. Specifically, the Armenian government excluded dual citizens from participating in the ECHR judge candidate competition by establishing stricter requirements than those that exist even for presidential or parliamentary candidates.
Such restrictions did not exist during the previous ECHR judicial selection in 2014. This created a paradoxical situation: a dual-citizen lawyer could renounce their other citizenship to become a Court of Cassation judge but couldn’t even be included in the list of ECHR judicial candidates. Currently, there are ECHR judges who hold dual citizenship.
Transparency Issues
A serious transparency problem with the selection committee’s work was the non-disclosure of candidates’ CVs. This contradicts both ECHR practice, where judges’ biographies are publicly available, and Armenia’s domestic practice, where candidates’ biographies are mandatorily published during judicial selections in the National Assembly.
According to human rights advocate Siranush Sahakyan, head of the Center for International and Comparative Law, the national selection process for ECHR judge candidates had serious procedural violations. “The process transparency was problematic. The candidates’ CVs weren’t published, and their evaluation forms weren’t provided even to the candidates themselves. Our inquiries to the government remained unanswered, citing personal data protection,” says Sahakyan. She adds that during the previous competition, all candidates’ CVs were published. In the current process, candidates’ evaluation forms were concealed, which strongly contradicts transparency principles.
Committee Composition
The formation of the competition committee was problematic from the start. Changes implemented by the Prime Minister’s decision significantly altered the committee’s representative nature.
While the Union of Judges of Armenia was represented in 2014, it was replaced by the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly Vanadzor Office (HCAV) by the Prime Minister. The president of the Union of Judges, former judge Alexander Azaryan, is known for his decision to release Robert Kocharyan from detention, after which he faced pressure. The reasoning behind selecting HCAV remains unclear, as is why the government didn’t allow other NGOs to participate in the committee’s work.
Aside from the HCAV, the committee composition exclusively included official government representatives. Notably, even from the Supreme Judicial Council (SJC), instead of appointing an academic member, they included Hayk Grigoryan, a former head of the Investigative Committee who was appointed as an SJC judge from the state system. As a result, only individuals closely aligned with the government ended up among the candidates.
According to Siranush Sahakyan, PACE turned a blind eye to these procedural violations purely for geopolitical reasons. “PACE hasn’t been consistent in its approach, which is conditioned by Armenia’s position in the West-East orientations. Such inconsistency in these matters is a form of political support that could contribute to Armenia’s final orientation,” Sahakyan said.
The post Armenia’s ECHR Judge Appointed Despite Lack of Transparency in National Selection Process appeared first on CIVILNET.