At the same time, it declined to clarify whether a key reference to the country’s Declaration of Independence has been removed from the yet unpublished document.
“This is not the text that we will be publishing. We are going to publish a new text, not amendments to the Constitution,” Mariam Melkumian, a spokesperson for the minister of justice, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
The website Ishkhanutyun.am reported earlier on Friday that it had obtained a revised version of Armenia’s constitution, according to which, the preamble to the constitution does not include a reference to the 1990 Declaration of Independence.
That declaration cites a 1989 act on the unification of Soviet Armenia and the then Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast, a provision that Azerbaijan considers a territorial claim.
Melkumian declined to give a direct answer when asked whether the reference to the declaration is absent from the final draft, saying only that further clarification would be provided later.
Minister of Justice Srbuhi Galian also declined to clarify the issue when she announced earlier this week that work on the draft text had been completed. She told media on Monday that discussions are still ongoing within the government and the ruling party’s parliamentary faction, and that the full text, including the preamble, will be published at a later stage.
Azerbaijan has demanded the removal of the declaration from Armenia’s constitution as a precondition for signing a peace agreement between the two countries.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has recently pledged to implement such a change, describing the declaration as a source of conflict. He has also maintained that adopting a new constitution without the reference reflects Armenia’s own agenda.
Opposition groups in Armenia have criticized Pashinian’s position, arguing that removing the reference to the declaration from the constitution would amount to a unilateral concession that could prompt further demands from Azerbaijan without guaranteeing a lasting peace.