Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party drafted the law and hastily pushed it through the outgoing Armenian parliament following disputed parliamentary elections held on June 7. 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 Armenian opposition 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 a referendum.”
Opposition lawmakers appealed to the Constitutional Court in July to declare the controversial disenfranchisement unconstitutional. The court said on Tuesday that it will start formally considering the appeal on December 22. All of its nine judges have been installed by Civil Contract.
Senior members of Pashinian’s party maintain that the law does not run counter to the Armenian constitution. They have linked its passage to their 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 leaders 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.
Pashinian’s political allies have denied any connection between the law and the planned referendum.