Summary: The Judicial Practice of Replacing the Detention through Alternative Preventive Measure in the RA during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Protection of Rights without Borders NGO has conducted an examination on the practice of the application of preventive measures applied by the domestic courts during the COVID-19 pandemic, the grounds and justification of detention, the risk assessment of the pandemic, the risk caused by the latter and role of the pandemic for applying the relevant preventive measures.

In this regard, 129 cases (on 149 people) containing decisions on replacing the detention through alternative preventive measure against the accused have been examined through a specially elaborated questionnaire.

Taking into account the legislative regulations on the pre-trial secrecy of the information during the pre-trail proceedings, as well as the non-public nature of the decisions made in terms of the detention of the accused, the publicly accessible decisions on the examination of the interventions to replace the detention through alternative preventive measure during the judicial investigation of the criminal cases by the RA courts of general jurisdiction within the period of March 16 of 2020 to June 30 of 2020 have been examined.  

91 interventions (61%) irrelevant to the application of preventive measure against 149 accused have been rejected and 58 interventions (39 %) have been respectively satisfied.

The examination is summarized with recommendations directed to the solution of the presented problems.

The examination was conducted by the “Protection of Rights without Borders” NGO with the financial support of the Open Society Foundations – Armenia in the scope of the Project on “Examination of the Practice on the Detention Practices during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Support to the Maintenance of the Universal Human Rights Criteria”.

Summary: The Judicial Practice of Replacing the Detention through Alternative Preventive Measure in the RA during the COVID-19 Pandemic