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Armenia’s Fight Over the Rule of Law Has Echoes Across the Region

While several post-Soviet countries such as Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine now routinely hold free and fair elections, another democratic pillar—rule of law—has proved much more difficult to achieve.

by Thomas de Waal

published by

World Politics Review

on March 3, 2020

Source: World Politics Review

If you thought judicial appointments were an explosive issue in the United States, just look at Armenia, where over the past year, the government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has declared war on Armenia’s senior judges. Most recently, Pashinyan has called a popular referendum for April 5 to remove seven of the nine judges on the Constitutional Court, whom he accuses of blocking his reform agenda.

The government sees this as a last-ditch measure to clean up a corrupt justice system that Pashinyan inherited from former President Serzh Sargsyan. For the judges, it is an assault by politicians on the rule of law. In an unusual statement last month, the president of the Venice Commission, the Council of Europe’s venerable advisory body on constitutional law, called on both sides “to exercise restraint and to de-escalate this worrying situation in order to ensure the normal operation of the constitution of Armenia.”

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This article was originally published by World Politics Review.

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