11/07/2020 14:54
Another extension of state of emergency regime inadmissible: three opposition parties release joint statement
Prosperous Armenia, Armenian Revolutionary Federation-Dashnaktsutyun and Hayrenik (Homeland) parties issued a statement about the actions of the authorities to combat coronavirus pandemic.
The parties stressed that from the very beginning the government ignored the alarms from other states and WHO demonstrating criminal negligence.
“Instead of preventing the spread of the pandemic and undertaking necessary measures, Nikol Pashinyan continued the crowded constitutional referendum campaign, ignoring the calls to stop this dangerous initiative and calls to sobriety even after the first case was recorded in Armenia,” the parties said in the statement.
“Instead of involving people in confronting the disaster with the joint efforts by establishing social solidarity, the government, not having clear strategy, as well as the Commandant’s Office and the head of the executive power interfering into its actions necessary or unnecessary hardly hit the public’s right perceptions of the danger, instead they adopted policy of cheap populism,” the statement said.
“Speculating the opportunities of the legal regime of state of emergency, the authorities, pursuing narrow group interests, illegally changed the Constitution, usurped the Constitutional Court and the power,” the statement said, stressing that foreign and anti-national agendas are being continuously advanced, on the threshold of social-economic disaster the property tax is being raised.
“The anti-constitutional behavior of the authorities has fully deprived the essence of the legal regime of the state of emergency of sense,” the parties said in their statement, adding that the state of emergency extended for already 120 days does not serve its purpose but restricts people’s rights without essentially promoting the overcoming of the pandemic.
The statement also says that the government and the ruling force of the obedient NA were unable to conduct policy of smoothing the economic decline and balanced social assistance.
“Painfully, we will face deep economic decline, huge unemployment rate and social disaster,” the parties said in the joint statement.
“Assessing the actions of the authorities to fight the pandemic failed, we believe that another extension of the state of emergency is inadmissible as it is done for restricting the rights of people, the freedoms of citizens, silencing the people’s voice of dissatisfaction,” the parties said.
“We demand from the political authorities to immediately stop the anti-state process of dissolving the constitutional institutions. Stop the actions aimed at serving the foreign agendas threatening national values, identity and public resistance. Review and lift the application of unlawful coercive measures reasoning with fight against the pandemic, including the administrative fines,” the statement concluded.