A court in Yerevan made such a decision at the start of Aleksan Aleksanian’s trial. It rejected prosecutors’ demand to extend his arrest by three months.
Aleksanian was arrested and charged with vote buying five days before the June 7 parliamentary elections in which Strong Armenia was the ruling Civil Contract party’s main challenger. Investigators raided 50 campaign offices of the bloc and arrested 25 other people two days later.
The Investigative Committee said Aleksanian hired last year some 1,400 people to work for a non-governmental organization that formed the backbone of Karapetian’s opposition movement. It claimed that they were paid to attend the movement’s rallies under the guise of their wages. Aleksanian and Strong Armenia reject the accusations as politically motivated.
As part of the same criminal case, the law-enforcement agency went on to also indict Karapetian’s nephew and right-hand man Narek, who now leads the second largest group in the Armenian parliament. But it has refrained from trying to arrest him so far.
Hundreds of other members or supporters of Karabakh’s bloc were also arrested on charges of giving or taking vote bribes ahead of the disputed elections. Two of them were elected to the parliament on the Strong Armenia ticket. They both were released from custody in July because of that.
The authorities opened a smaller number of such criminal cases against two other major opposition forces led by former President Robert Kocharian and businessman Gagik Tsarukian. Kocharian and Tsarukian were arrested in August and June respectively following Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s public pledges to imprison them.
Pashinian’s party itself was accused by the Armenian opposition of buying votes with public money. None of its members or supporters was prosecuted on corresponding charges. Election observers from the Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly (PACE) noted this fact in a report presented during a session of the Strasbourg-based body on Monday.
“Recent government social programs introduced shortly before the elections such as targeted debts forgiveness, and easing driving penalties were regarded as de facto campaign tools despite their technical compliance with election law,” said the report.