The Prosecutor’s Office considers that there are no grounds to terminate the criminal prosecution brought against Armenia’s second president Robert Kocharyan or to release him, by virtue of the Constitutional Court’s decision of 4 September. This was stated in a clarification issued by the Public Relations Department of the General Prosecutor’s Office.
Noting that with regard to the aforementioned decision of the Constitutional Court, “interpretations have been given that are based on isolated observations of individual paragraphs and do not derive from the meaning of the decision,” the Prosecutor’s Office, in particular, emphasised: “As the Constitutional Court has recorded, functional immunity is not provided for in Article 35 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Armenia as a circumstance excluding criminal proceedings. Consequently, in all cases where it becomes apparent that criminal prosecution is incompatible with a person’s functional immunity, the competent body is objectively deprived of the legal possibility to make a lawful decision not to institute criminal prosecution against that person on that basis or to terminate already instituted criminal prosecution, as well as not to apply detention, since the procedural basis for making such a decision is absent. More simply, the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Armenia has deemed Article 35 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Armenia problematic insofar as it does not provide for a ground to terminate criminal proceedings in the case where it becomes apparent that a person enjoys functional immunity and it has not been overcome.”
