Problem of political prisoners and independence of judiciary

The discussion on the topic “The Issue of the Political Prisoners and the Court Independence” took place on May 29 of 2018.

During the discussion, Haykuhi Harutyunyan, the President of the “Protection of Rights without Borders” NGO presented the assessments of PACE of the status of political prisoners.

According to H. Harutyunyan, the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe adopted mere legal position to give limited and concrete legal evaluation opportunities for the assessment of people in the similar status and to maintain the overall principal of the rule of law.

At the same time, H. Harutyunyan highlighted, that in accordance with Resolution N 1900 confirmed by PACE, a person deprived from freedom can be considered political prisoner:

First, if the deprivation of liberty was applied with the violation of the fundamental freedoms as prescribed by the European Convention on Human Rights, particularly with the violation of the right to freedom of thought, conscience, religion, expression, information, as well as freedom of assembly.

Second, if the detention was applied only for political reasons, with the absence of any crime.

According to H. Harutyunyan, PACE has come up with the initiative to amend or to change some wording of the Directive N 1900.

“The most important amendment that was made after the adoption of the resolution, was that the jurisdiction for the legal commentary to the resolution was given to the European Court of Human Rights. ECHR has important cases in this regard” – mentioned H.Harutyunyan.

As stated H. Harutyunyan, Article 18 is an obstacle, by which the states show restraint in their action and every time when there is an issue of human rights violation, as assessment is given and due to that assessment the statue of a person in the context of the resolution is taken, which enables to find out whether the detention of the person and the final punishment were in such a combination, by which the person can have a status of a political prisoner.

The full version of the discussion is available here