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July the 5th is annually celebrated as the Day of Constitution in Armenia.
The independent republic adopted its basic law in the wake of a universal referendum in 1995. This anniversary, however, is different from all the previous ones, as the country has now made a transition to the parliamentary form of government. After the 2015 constitutional referendum, Armenia practically adopted a new model of forming parliament, switching over to the 100% proportional representation system.
Although December 6, 2015 is officially known to be the new Constitution’s effective date, the transitional provisions contained therein make the state and society still feel somewhat “between” two constitutions.
The new Constitution was first enforced in February when the National Assembly’s Standing Committee on State and Legal Affairs elected the ombudsman. It will be implemented a second time during the local government elections in Yerevan and the second largest city of Gyumri. The new procedure requires that only political parties run for elections with proportional representation ballots.
Speaking to Tert.am, Edmon Marukuyan, a parliament member who is a lawyer by profession, said he sees differences between the Constitution’s text and the mechanisms of implementation. “[A lot depends on] who is responsible for the implementation and what political elite they shape ‘to bring the text to life’,” he said, not ruling out the possibility of discrepancies.
Marukyan stressed the importance of interpreting and implementing the basic law in good faith, admitting at the same time that the Republican Party of Armenia, as the only governing political force, has predominant positions over the other parties.
According to Artak Zeynalyan, a public and political figure specializing in legal studies, Armenia needs “two democratic elections” to give life to the new Constitution. In his words, officials still keep violating the basic law, ignoring particularly Article 3 thereof (establishing state guarantees to ensure fundamental human rights and freedoms).

Arthur Ghazinyan, the founder and head of the Yerevan State University’s Center for European Studies, says despite the Constitution’s 20-year history and the recent referendum, constitutional life hasn’t yet become constitutionalized among the citizens of Armenia.
“Constitution is not yet being perceived as a normative [legal] act regulating routine life in the human-to-human relationship or human-state dialogue. We haven’t to date developed that understanding; that’s a deep-rooted problem that has to be resolved over the course of years. And although the Constitution is cited in all the debates, people do not perceive and understand it. The population needs to understand that the constitution is the key normative act regulating their routine life as it does in Europe and the United States,” Ghazinyan added.

Anush Dashtents

By Siranush Ghazanchyan,

“The world has just commemorated the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims. However, contrary to conventional wisdom, this crime began with the Hamidian massacres of 1894-95, which were ordered by Sultan Abdülhamid II, and continued on a huge scale with the massacres perpetrated between 1915 and 1923, planned by the young Turks. They continue today with the massacres of Deir ez-Zor and Kessab, organized by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. For 120 years, the Turkish power elite have been successively massacring non-Muslimns – to general indifference – in order to build a homogenous nation,” Thierry Meyssan writes in an article published by Voltaire Network.

According to the author, “the centenary of the genocide of Turkish non-Muslims prepared the stage for festival of hypocrisy.” “While certain states celebrated the memory of the victims in Yerevan, others showed themselves to be shameless.”

“President Erdoğan had the opportunity to confess to this very old story, of which he is in no way responsible. Had he done so, he could have made his country a normal state. But no! Instead he hung onto his lies, denying History and affirming that there had been “only”100,000 dead, and that they had been executed for their participation in terrorist activities,” the article reads.

“By draping itself in this absurdity, today’s Turkey is not only manifesting its support for the Hamidian massacres of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1894-95) – which caused between 80,000 and 300,000 victims – but especially for the crimes committed by the “Special Organization” of the Union and Progress Committee (UPC), starting from 1915 until the election of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk as President of the Republic (1923), which caused between 1,200,000 and 1,500,000 deaths – and its ideological continuity with the ancient régime. And this is what we all noted with horror when, last year in 2014, we watched the Turkish army accompany the al-Nusra Front (in other words al-Qaïda in Syria) to Kessab for the purpose of chasing away the Armenian population. Or again, when the same Turkish army helped Daesh to dynamite the Deir ez-Zor Memorial, which commemorated the 1916 extermination of more than 200,000 Armeniens in the camp that the Turks had built for them,” the author writes.

“Pan-Islamism, the project of Sultan Abdülhamid II and the Young Turks early in the 20th century, like the AKP today, aims to become the leader of the sunnite world, and in order to achieve this aim, it intends to create a homogenous sunnite state. This project required the extermination of the Christians (Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Assyro-Chaldeans) and the Yezidis. They all died, exactly as Daesh is exterminating Christians and Yezidis today,” Thierry Meyssan continues.

According to him, the intervention of the Turkish army into Syrian territory, at Kessab and Deir ez-Zor, is coherent with this project, since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hopes to annex Northern Syria once NATO has overthrown President Bachar el-Assad.

Thierry Meyssan is a French intellectual, founder and chairman of Voltaire Network and the Axis for Peace Conference.