US State Department report: Human rights organizations report an increase in police abuse in Armenia
In 2023, the local NGO community noted an increased number of reports of police abuse, including in police stations, which, unlike prisons and police detention facilities, were not subject to public monitoring. This is stated in the 2023 Country Reports on Human Rights Practices: Armenia annual report of the US Department of State.
“On July 3, more than 30 NGOs issued a statement noting “unprecedented violence and instances of torture in police departments and other law enforcement agencies” in recent months, characterizing the violence as becoming systemic and revealing what they viewed as ineffective police and judicial reforms. The organizations noted that violence against attorneys was unprecedented and that additional cases indicated a growing trend of police impunity. They stated the government’s failure to promptly investigate reports and bring perpetrators to justice resulted in impunity and decreased public trust in the law enforcement system. According to the July 25 report by the Helsinki Citizens Assembly Vanadzor on monitoring of police reform, there were 199 reports of human rights violation by police during 2022, a 20 percent increase compared with 2021 and 54 percent increase compared with 2019,” the aforesaid report noted.
“Criminal justice bodies continued to rely on confessions and information obtained during questioning to secure convictions. According to human rights lawyers, procedural safeguards against mistreatment during police questioning, such as inadmissibility of evidence obtained through force or procedural violations, were insufficient, as was a video surveillance system that was installed in only a few police stations and had not yet been used in police mistreatment cases. According to human rights lawyers, while many cases occurred in Yerevan, the situation in regional police stations was worse,” added the US State Department report.