This past Friday I was excited for my triumphant return to the Administrative Court of Armenia. Meltex v. National Commission on TV and Radio was finally ready for the argument stage after postponing a month for a third party intervenor. After 15 minutes of sitting in the courtroom, the case was once more indefinitely postponed. What little faith I had in the Armenian judicial system is waning.
As soon as I arrived at the office, I was thrown into a cab and we were headed across town to the courthouse. I was ready. I had read up on the Meltex (A1+) case and was beginning to understand the uphill battle that political speech has in this country. Recently, the judiciary has rejected numerous appeals from Meltex even in light of the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to reject Armenia’s interpretation of the applicable law. The government itself is openly hostile to any outcome that awards A1+ a media license. Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and other international NGOs that watch media rights around the world have called the government’s rejection of the ECHR’s opinion a significant blow to freedom of speech in Armenia. This case is genuinely important.
We were again in the same courtroom, with the same advocates and the same judge again wearing his robe casually. Like an Armenian Scalia, he disallowed the press to bring video cameras into the courtroom—poetic considering the merits of the case. After some procedural mumblings, the judge called for new business. Meltex, for whatever reason, decided to amend their complaint. The judge and the government’s attorney had not yet been served with this new complaint. Subsequently, the government asked for a week to prepare its answer. The judge said he’d make it an indefinite postponement and that was it, we were ushered out of the courtroom, and I was unsatisfied with the performance.
I felt frustrated. I know that the law can be aggravatingly slow at times, but this is more than a backlogged court working slowly; this is obstruction.
I asked my translator what her thoughts were and whether or not the outcome was a foregone conclusion. She said that there was little chance that the government would lose. It was at this point that she pined for revolution—presumably the not violent kind, but I didn’t ask—and a return of the Republic’s first (and also corrupt) president Ter-Petrossyan.
It was only a week ago that I was walking near the Opera House and there was quite a bit of commotion and marching. Unable to understand much more than hello in Armenian, I didn’t know what was happening and so I moved on. Come to find out, it was a large opposition protest led by Ter-Petrossyan calling for early elections. The news covered these protests as unsettling and dangerous; being there, I barely even noticed they happened.
I wouldn’t go as far as my colleague or the protesters and say that a revolution is in order; however, it does raise the question of how do you create a civil society where your two options want to limit access to speech and justice for their own gain. Politically, I think Armenia’s hands are tied. Both parties run on anti-corruption platforms, but this is just a thinly veiled complaint regarding their ouster from civil society, not a genuine pledge to clean up corruption or universally apply human rights. In actuality, they just want to give corruption a new face.
This is the conundrum I felt bothered by after leaving the courtroom yesterday. Much of the reading I did before coming to Armenia pertained to the nation’s gains, not their problems. This case could be put off indefinitely or worse the court could again find for the government and just pay the fines for bucking the ECHR’s ruling. This outcome would leave freedom of speech a theory and not a practice in Armenia—this theory can be found at Art. 27 of their Constitution.
At the hearing yesterday, the judge voiced his concerns about A1+’s application for a media license. His concerns were nearly verbatim from the government’s official rejection of the ECHR and A1+’s complaint. My heart sank. The rejections are technical, they pertain to missing signatures on a few pages and a few inconsequential fields that were left blank on A1+’s application. I’m certain this is the foreshadowing of an unfortunate outcome for freedom of speech.
Undoubtedly, Armenia has come a long way in the past generation, but I think I over valued the democratic reforms this nation has pushed through. On one of my first days in Yerevan, I was walking through an underground stall market and one of the booksellers came up to talk to me as I glanced through his maps. Asking where I was from, I told him I was from America. His reaction was “America? Freedom! America has freedom!” I nodded hesitantly and held a short and linguistically limited conversation with him. The bookseller knew the word freedom, he knew his country didn’t have it, he knew he wanted it, but does he or anyone else know how to get it?
I don't.
As soon as I arrived at the office, I was thrown into a cab and we were headed across town to the courthouse. I was ready. I had read up on the Meltex (A1+) case and was beginning to understand the uphill battle that political speech has in this country. Recently, the judiciary has rejected numerous appeals from Meltex even in light of the European Court of Human Rights’ decision to reject Armenia’s interpretation of the applicable law. The government itself is openly hostile to any outcome that awards A1+ a media license. Human Rights Watch, Freedom House and other international NGOs that watch media rights around the world have called the government’s rejection of the ECHR’s opinion a significant blow to freedom of speech in Armenia. This case is genuinely important.
We were again in the same courtroom, with the same advocates and the same judge again wearing his robe casually. Like an Armenian Scalia, he disallowed the press to bring video cameras into the courtroom—poetic considering the merits of the case. After some procedural mumblings, the judge called for new business. Meltex, for whatever reason, decided to amend their complaint. The judge and the government’s attorney had not yet been served with this new complaint. Subsequently, the government asked for a week to prepare its answer. The judge said he’d make it an indefinite postponement and that was it, we were ushered out of the courtroom, and I was unsatisfied with the performance.
I felt frustrated. I know that the law can be aggravatingly slow at times, but this is more than a backlogged court working slowly; this is obstruction.
I asked my translator what her thoughts were and whether or not the outcome was a foregone conclusion. She said that there was little chance that the government would lose. It was at this point that she pined for revolution—presumably the not violent kind, but I didn’t ask—and a return of the Republic’s first (and also corrupt) president Ter-Petrossyan.
It was only a week ago that I was walking near the Opera House and there was quite a bit of commotion and marching. Unable to understand much more than hello in Armenian, I didn’t know what was happening and so I moved on. Come to find out, it was a large opposition protest led by Ter-Petrossyan calling for early elections. The news covered these protests as unsettling and dangerous; being there, I barely even noticed they happened.
I wouldn’t go as far as my colleague or the protesters and say that a revolution is in order; however, it does raise the question of how do you create a civil society where your two options want to limit access to speech and justice for their own gain. Politically, I think Armenia’s hands are tied. Both parties run on anti-corruption platforms, but this is just a thinly veiled complaint regarding their ouster from civil society, not a genuine pledge to clean up corruption or universally apply human rights. In actuality, they just want to give corruption a new face.
This is the conundrum I felt bothered by after leaving the courtroom yesterday. Much of the reading I did before coming to Armenia pertained to the nation’s gains, not their problems. This case could be put off indefinitely or worse the court could again find for the government and just pay the fines for bucking the ECHR’s ruling. This outcome would leave freedom of speech a theory and not a practice in Armenia—this theory can be found at Art. 27 of their Constitution.
At the hearing yesterday, the judge voiced his concerns about A1+’s application for a media license. His concerns were nearly verbatim from the government’s official rejection of the ECHR and A1+’s complaint. My heart sank. The rejections are technical, they pertain to missing signatures on a few pages and a few inconsequential fields that were left blank on A1+’s application. I’m certain this is the foreshadowing of an unfortunate outcome for freedom of speech.
Undoubtedly, Armenia has come a long way in the past generation, but I think I over valued the democratic reforms this nation has pushed through. On one of my first days in Yerevan, I was walking through an underground stall market and one of the booksellers came up to talk to me as I glanced through his maps. Asking where I was from, I told him I was from America. His reaction was “America? Freedom! America has freedom!” I nodded hesitantly and held a short and linguistically limited conversation with him. The bookseller knew the word freedom, he knew his country didn’t have it, he knew he wanted it, but does he or anyone else know how to get it?
I don't.
