Mr. Karen Andreasyan, RoA Human Rights Defender, is now addressing Mr. Hrayr Tovmasyan, the Minister of Justice with his report about subjecting three Judges to disciplinary sanction: Human Rights Defender's Office informs about this.

As a reminder, three citizens had applied to Human Rights Defender, being sure that Judges had treated them unfairly. The Defender decided to take the three complaints mentioned out of many other similar ones, because, according to his assessment, in these cases Judges' ventured obvious and gross violations of Law related to the cases mentioned. The Defender had mentioned the three Judges in his reports addressed to the Disciplinary Committee of the RA Council of Justice and informed the public about his reports. This was immediately followed by public "attacks" on the Human Rights Defender's Institution initiated on behalf of various bodies of the Judicial System in the form of misinformation, misleading citations brought from legal acts, illegal "appeals" and ignorant accusations.

Thereupon, the Disciplinary Committee of the RA Council of Justice dismissed the proceedings of all the three cases on the following ground: "... studying the report and the reporting materials, he/she figured out that ... grounds for disciplinary proceedings are not sufficient".

"This 4-line dismissal got two omissions: first, materials adjacent to the Defender's reports' have never been sent, and therefore one can assume, that the Disciplinary Committee was not even aware of what it had examined. The second, in order to institute a disciplinary sanction according to the Judicial Code, the presence of apparent grounds of obvious and gross violations of the legal norms are being considered as sufficient; on the other hand, the letter from the Disciplinary Committee indicating the point of the "insufficient basis" for instituting a sanction, implies that there was at least one ground for each case; and the Judicial Code does not define that several grounds are necessary for the proceeding. In the written response of the Disciplinary Committee to the Defender's report on these omissions it is written that "an exhaustive answer is given", informs the Department of Information and Public Relations of the HRD Office.

Not considering the process exhausted and with consistent determination to continue the struggle, the Ombudsman submitted his reports to the other authority having jurisdiction in respect of disciplinary proceedings, the RA Minister of Justice.

Human Rights Defender's task is:

 to reestablish the three (3) applicants belief towards the Court and Justice;

 to show the public by concrete examples how the only mechanism protecting the society from  judicial

 to eliminate the monopolistic and clan manifestations of the current disciplinary mechanism, to  release the fair judges from the pressure of often unfairly operating disciplinary mechanism.

The Defender is predicting one of the following developments:

 The RA Minister of Justice and Human Rights will join the struggle and support the above-        mentioned issues.

 The RA Minister of Justice will join the Judicial Council disciplinary committee and will not see at  least prima facie violations in 19 months duration case and after it in the failure of execution  of the clear requirement of the law, or in violation of the presumption of innocence, in not        providing an interpreter and in other procedural errors.

 The society will eventually join the struggle of the Human Rights Defender with these three    exemplary cases and will require a thorough, open and reasoned responses and process,  which can positively affect at least fifty percent of cases of human rights abuses, as our  statistics and deep conviction show that this is the amount of the fault that the Judicial      System has in the general picture of human rights violations in the counrty.

The Human Rights Defender acts in this way and form only in cases where the Constitution, the Law or the relevant state bodies do not give a chance to protect people's inalienable rights and vital interests through cooperation and discussion.