Meeting with Ter-Petrosyan was held earlier
OSCE acting chairman, State Secretary-Foreign Minister of Kazakhstan Kanat Saudabayev held two meetings with the RA First President and the NKR President at "Golden Palace" hotel at the same time.
The first meeting was with RA former president Levon Ter-Petrosyan. After a brief hand-shake, the two held a meeting in a narrow format with the participation of Head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan Sergey Kapinos and Armenian National Congress coordinator Levon Zurabyan. After the meeting, Zurabyan told journalists that they had expressed their concerns to the OSCE chairman about the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and the Turkish-Armenian reconciliation.
"We seriously stressed the issue of democracy and human rights. We believe that the OSCE is not paying adequate attention to those issues and we expect to see certain corrected approaches. Time will show to what extent our concerns will be considered," said Levon Zurabyan who also said that the OSCE is well aware of the internal political processes in Armenia.
Let us mention that the meeting with Levon Ter-Petrosyan was scheduled for 2 p.m., but as ANC representative Vladimir Karapetyan mentioned, it was changed to 11:20 a.m. Perhaps that was the reason why NKR President Bako Sahakyan was forced to wait in the next hall because his meeting was also scheduled at that time.
Head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan Sergey Kapinos told "A1+" that there were no implications for the simultaneous meetings with Bako Sahakyan and Levon Ter-Petrosyan.
"That was simply a coincidence. The OSCE chairman usually meets with public-political forces of the government and the opposition. The topic of discussion with Levon Ter-Petrosyan was not strictly about the Congress. Since Ter-Petrosyan was one of the main candidates during the 2008 presidential elections and heads the coalition of non-parliamentary parties, we decided to meet with him as well," he told "A1+".
As far as the issues of democracy and human rights are concerned, according to Sergey Kapinos, it is first necessary to solve a number of legal issues.
"The legal issues can only be solved in a coordinated manner. It is not correct and unrealistic to speak about protection of human rights without the improvement of the judicial system and raising the level of independence. We have plans and programs and believe that it is impossible to achieve results in a short amount of time. It is a process, a movement. The most important thing is for us not to stay where we are and to move forward," said Kapinos.
As for the persecutions against the Sukiasyan family backing the first president, according to the Head of the OSCE Office in Yerevan, they still don't have sufficient information to come to conclusions.
