In Armenia, rights defenders hold seminar on international standards on freedom of speech for judges and lawyers

In Yerevan, November 3 was the last day of the three-day seminar for judges and lawyers, organized by the Public Organization "Union of European Rights" with the support of the OSCE Office and US Embassy. According to the Chair of the "Union of European Rights", Armenian journalists, lawyers have very poor awareness in the sphere of the human right to the freedom of speech; and the seminar was aimed at repairing the situation.

As reported by the "Caucasian Knot" correspondent, the invited experts to the seminar were Gavin Miller, a member of the organization "Doughty Street Chambers", a British rights defender and a Royal Adviser, and Boiko Boevi, the chief lawyer of the well-known international organization in the sphere of the freedom of expression "Article 19".

According to the organizers, seminars are held at the background of the growing number of lawsuits against journalists and media professionals in Armenia. The aim of the seminar is to protect the freedom of expression and strengthen the awareness of the respective right in the society. The seminar dealt with the issues relating to libel and defamation, the right to have one's privacy duly respected, as well as the disrespect to the court and coverage of trials and freedom of speech in the context of elections.

The seminar brought together 20 Armenian judges and about the same number of lawyers.

According to Lusine Akopyan, Chair of the "Union of European Rights", the participants of the seminar were selected by her Union; those were the judges and lawyers who had run cases on libel and defamation. "We want to raise the awareness among judges and lawyers of Armenia on international standards on the freedom of speech, enabling us to achieve greater protection of our rights," she said.

The seminar was conducted separately for judges and included mostly presentations of the experts invited from abroad, and separately for lawyers - the core of this part was in case studies.

"The monitoring conducted by our Union has shown that journalists, lawyers and judges have a very low level of awareness of the human right to the freedom of speech. Our Constitution is very clear about these rights; however, in practice they are poorly applied," said Lusine Akopyan.

According to Alexander Sirunyan, Director of the Law Bureau, we cannot state categorically that there is no freedom of speech in Armenia. This is evidenced by the fact that anyone can write everything in social networks; and to this day there was not a single case, when someone was persecuted for that.

Olga Safaryan, a lawyer and the chair of the "Committee in Defence of the Freedom of Speech", finds such seminars, where the audience can compare their practices with the ECtHR, very useful.

According to her story, the Armenian legislation fully complies with international standards. "We have a problem with enforcement and application. The law is not always bad, but it should be correctly applied," said the lawyer.

She believes that the topic of libel and defamation is the most critical issue for Armenia, especially in anticipation of the upcoming elections.

The law specifies the amount of compensation for insult of up to 1 million drams (more than 2600 US dollars), and for libel - up to 2 million drams (more than 5200 US dollars).

"As a rule, the courts make use of the maximum sanction, for unknown reasons," said Safaryan. "Usually, a lawsuit may have both slander and defamation. The courts collect, apart from these 3 million drams, also the court costs. That is, any newspaper may be easily driven into bankruptcy. For Armenia, this is quite a topical problem."

The lawyer has also noted that the results of the last quarterly monitoring of Armenia's courts revealed about 30 lawsuits on libel and defamation. They are filed against media mainly by oligarchs and MPs, and, in practice, "the law on libel and defamation has turned against media, as all the oligarchs' lawsuits have been satisfied," said Safaryan.

She said that the Armenian Ombudsperson Karen Andreasyan had appealed to the Constitutional Court in order to define whether this law is consistent or inconsistent with the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia. The hearing is scheduled for November 15, 2011.