Letter to the PACE
President of the Center for Rights and Freedom NGO Vardan Harutyunyan has sent an open letter to the PACE. We present the letter in its entirety:
"On September 8, the PACE Monitoring Committee adopted another draft resolution on Armenia to be discussed at the plenary session in October.
We regret, but must mention that the text of the draft resolution contains several provisions that are inacceptable for the Armenian society and don't express the current atmosphere in Armenia at all.
The groundless claims on considering the page of the ten unrevealed murders of 1 March 2008 turned over and the inaptness of holding snap elections in Armenia are particularly troubling. We are aware that the Co-Rapporteurs on Armenia have received multilateral information about Armenia from all possible sources, are well aware of the current state of the country, and their proposal of such a version of the draft is, to say the least, strange.
Local and international law-defense organizations, European organizations, the PACE and the U.S. Department of State have publicly condemned the fact that the current Armenian authorities used the army, armed police officers, military equipment and ammunition against peaceful protesters on 1 March 2008 to disperse the thousand-man protests that launched after the 2008 falsified presidential elections, sentencing over 150 people as political prisoners, injuring over 200 and killing ten.
During the past three years, the authorities have not taken any steps to reveal the case of March 1 and have impeded the efforts for revelation. They even disbanded the Fact-Finding Group, which was established under the pressure of international organizations and Armenian society to reveal the case of March 1. As long as the case of March 1 remains unrevealed, and the culprits of the murders and assaults have not been brought to justice by a fair and independent court, nobody, including the PACE can rule out the repetition of such events. Nobody has the moral right to claim that that page has turned over in the contemporary history of Armenia, not to mention the fact that a people that doesn't come to grips with falsified elections always has the right to demand snap elections.
With this letter, we voice hope that this draft resolution, which is overtly aimed at strengthening the positions of a regime that came to power at the price of political persecutions, pressures and murders and isn't honorable for the PACE and depreciates the PACE's efforts in Armenia throughout all these years, will be rejected at the plenary session or will be modified in order to correspond to Armenia's reality."
