Discussion on the topic “The Activity Principals of Law Enforcement Bodies in Democratic and Legal States”

On November 20 of 2018, Haykuhi Harutyunyan, the President of the Protection of Rights without Borders NGO presented her observations during the discussion on the topic “The Necessity to Amend the RA Law on Operational Intelligence Activities”.

According to Haykuhi Harutyunyan, any defence mechanism is not stipulated by the current legislation.  Firstly, protection of person from the possible intervention should be created.

If the person has received criminal case materials, where there is a decision on the application of inspection measures towards him, there is no possibility to appeal the legitimacy of the decision. The problems regarding the current law have been analyzed and presented under the light of the decisions made by the European Court of Human Rights in regard to similar recorded violations prescribed by the European Convnetion of Human Rights.

Concrete, detailed rules, as well as respective legislation concerning the application of intervention during phone calls are needed. Besides, the law should precisely present the circumstances and conditions, under which the law enforcement bodies can apply and use those measures.

The discretional powers, as well as its application mechanisms of the law enforcement body within the current legislation should precisely be presented, which will enable the person to be protected from arbitrary interference of his phone calls. The efficient oversight over the application of the operative inspection measures is not envisaged by the current legislation of the Republic of Republic.

The oversight over the application of measures together with the oversight liabilities over the legitimacy of the general proceeding belong to the Prosecutor General’s Office.

At the same time, the Prosecutor should give an instruction to adopt a decision on taking operative-inspective measures. Such complicated mechanism of actions, in fact, cannot be considered as an oversight over the legitimacy of the application of operative-inspective measures, moreover, when it is prescribed by the law, that ways of organizing and implementing operative-inspective measures are not included in the prosecutorial liabilities.

According to the law, the person who was subjected to operative-inspective measure, does not report about it before or during the application of the inspective measure. This can be considered as a justification from the security and public protection perspective.

Nevertheless, in case when the proceeding of the criminal case is being discontinued, the criminal persecution against the person is stopped and the person should be informed about the operative-inspective measure applied against him/her.

The mentioned problems are not thus limited and there is a strong need of a new law on “Operational Intelligence Activities” based on the complete review of the law and the protection of human rights.

It should be mentioned, that the necessity to amend the RA Law on “Operational Intelligence Activities” was discussed within the scope of the event “The Activity Principals of Law Enforcement Bodies in Democratic and Legal States” organized by the “Partnership for Open Society” initiative.

The full version of the discussion is available with the following link