At a recent meeting with Gianni Buquicchio, the president of the Council of Europe’s Venice Commission, the speaker of Armenia’s National Assembly reportedly blamed the Constitutional Court for the country’s failure to ratify by far the Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (aka Istanbul convention).
According to the paper, Ararat Mirzoyan met with the European official on Monday to brief him on the Armenian society’s general negative attitude to the document and highlight, particularly, Hrayr Tovmasyan’s role (as the Constitutional Court’s chair) as the main impediment to the ratification process.
The paper earlier reported that a CoE lobbying group is set to visit Yerevan on November 1 to discuss the timeframes of ratification with members of the National Assembly’s Standing Committees on Human Rights, State and Legal Affairs and Foreign Relations.