July 21, 2006

Heritage Headquarters Under Lock Again

Yerevan—The Service for Mandatory Execution of Judicial Acts (SMEJA) of the Ministry of Justice, which recently became the visible servant of the business and political interests of the ruling clan in Armenia, this time even surpassed itself.

Today, on July 21, approximately thirty marshals from SMEJA, led by Major Vahram Yenokian, head of SMEJA’s Central and Nork-Marash Division, again surrounded the Heritage Party’s main office which, based on the Court’s ruling that went into effect on July 12, had been reopened yesterday, on July 20. Initially, the SMEJA officials prohibited the staff from entering their office and subsequently locked and resealed the office doors. When Heritage Chairman Raffi Hovannisian demanded that he show a Court order or other legal warrant to that effect, Yenokian shamelessly responded that they were carrying this out in line with Hovannisian’s own formal request for execution of the Court’s June 26 verdict. This demonstrated that the high-ranking SMEJA officer interpreted that ruling in a way that was convenient for him and those he serves. Yenokian was under strict telephonic orders and thus was simply uncompromising. He did not even reply to Zaruhi Postanjian, Hovannisian’s attorney, who demanded that they wait until Judge Edward Avetisian formally elucidated his verdict pursuant to a request for clarification officially submitted to him today.

With respect to the unlawful actions—which obviously were “directives from above”—of the state-owned Paronian theater’s management against the party’s main office, Judge Avetisian of the Court of First Instance of Yerevan’s Central and Nork-Marash communities had issued on April 14 an injunction prohibiting the defendant theater from taking any restrictive action against the office in question and the usage of the property located in it and forwarded its ruling to SMEJA. Then, on June 26, the same Court ruled that the forcible closure of the Heritage office was illegal, and thus the SMEJA seals placed on the doors of the office had effectively expired. While the Court instructed the plaintiff to pay certain installments on the contract, it held the defendant and its negligent conduct to be solely responsible for this situation, thus constructively validating the five-year real-estate lease that had been signed between Hovannisian and the government’s agent in September 2002.

In Yenokian’s words, they were sealing the doors today since they would soon be removing the party’s belongings from the office and taking them to SMEJA. The lawless lackeys wearing official uniforms for the ruling clique should come to understand that they will be held accountable for their flagrantly illegal acts, the sole objective of which is to obstruct and disrupt the normal, lawful activities of any and all political opposition.