Police have not changed in Armenia- Human Rights Reference  

  21 February 2020    Read: 1356
  Police have not changed in Armenia- Human Rights Reference  
 

In 2019, 90 cases of human rights violations were reported based on media reports, the Armenian media reported.

49 cases of the reporting year were during and as a result of public events, and 41 were individual.

In 2015, there were 304 cases of human rights violations, 338 in 2016, 107 in 2017, 181 in 2018. This is stated in the Reference Summary of cases of human rights violations by the Helsinki Citizens' Assembly-Vanadzor in 2019. The human rights organization has monitored 15 online media, official websites of the RA Police and Special Investigation Service.

Comparison of individual cases of human rights violations by police officers and cases of human rights violations recorded in 2015-2019.

The results of the monitoring show that cases of an individual nature are usually not properly publicized by the responsible authorities and are not adequately covered.

The rights to personal liberty and immunity and non-violence are most frequently violated, like in previous years.

Although the number of offences in the reporting year has been declining, police operations have not undergone a radical change.

Police officers have continued cases of human rights abuses, including the use of physical force, electoral restriction, freedom of expression, contravention of the principle of legal certainty, and unpredictability. The police have also been inactive in several situations requiring their intervention.

The results of the monitoring allow us to prove that, both before and after the revolution, the police continue to:

- conceal torture and leave the perpetrators unpunished

- fail to comply with the principles of reporting and transparent practices

- detain persons illegally and without legal justification and incorrectly record the time of detention in the register

- use the services of civilians and violate the right to freedom of assembly

- arbitrarily obstruct public events

- not to observe the principle of legal certainty when, in one case, a person is detained for threatening, but the actions of the offending person in the police station are not prevented because of his or her subsequent allegedly evaluating his or her actions;

- to present contradictory arguments to the participants of similar public actions; for example, blocking access to and exit from the courts is qualified as spontaneous assembly; in other cases, the concentration of police forces at the entrance is justified by the need to ensure free movement.

- continues to detain persons before and after the demonstration, and to invade homes at night

- humiliating, videotaping, and disseminating dignity of
persons by any attribute, such as being "fat" or wearing black

Therefore, HCA Vanadzor concludes that police behaviour has not changed radically, it continues to operate without upholding the principles of legal certainty and legal predictability.


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