Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party drafted the law and hastily pushed it through Armenia’s outgoing parliament during its final session concluded on Friday. It stipulates that Armenian citizens will lose voting rights if they have stayed in their home country for less than half of the two years preceding elections or a referendum.
The opposition minority in the parliament says the law runs counter to the Armenian constitution which guarantees “universal, equal, free and direct suffrage” for all citizens without setting any residency requirements. Under Article 48 of the constitution, Armenians aged 18 and older “have the right to elect and the right to participate in the referendum.”
Civil Contract deputies denied any violation of these provisions during a short parliament debate that took place on Thursday.
“The bill is aimed at correcting practices recorded ruing the recent parliamentary elections,” one of them, Arusyak Julhakian, said.
She alluded to Civil Contract allegations that many Armenian citizens living in Russia were paid to travel to Armenia and vote for billionaire Samvel Karapetian’s opposition alliance in the June 7 elections. No such citizens are known to have been identified and prosecuted by Armenian law-enforcement authorities. Official figures show that the number of expats who entered Armenia from January through May was up only about 3,000 from the year-earlier period.
Opposition parliamentarians claim that the real purpose of the law is to make it easier for Pashinian to enact through a referendum a new Armenian constitution demanded by Azerbaijan. Under the existing constitution, it has to be backed by at least one-quarter of the country’s 2.5 million or so eligible voters, among them hundreds of thousands of Armenians living in Russia. The total number of such voters should decrease considerably after the disenfranchisement of expats.
Ruben Rubinian, a parliament vice-speaker and senior ruling party figure, denied any connection between the law and the planned referendum. He would not say how Pashinian’s political team could hold such a vote in the absence of a two-thirds majority in the new Armenian parliament elected on June 7.
“We will discuss and figure out,” Rubinian told reporters vaguely.
The current constitution stipulates that the draft of a new constitution must be approved by at least two-thirds of the parliament deputies before being put on a referendum. Some opposition figures and commentators have speculated that Pashinian could circumvent this requirement.