Republic Party seeks cancellation of Strong Armenia list

PanARMENIAN.Net - Aram Sargsyan, chairman of the Republic Party and the first candidate on its electoral list, has announced that he will appeal to Armenia’s Central Electoral Commission (CEC), seeking to have the registration of the electoral list of the Strong Armenia Alliance invalidated.

Speaking on the Chibukhchyan Live program, Sargsyan said his initiative would be based on information published by law enforcement agencies, according to 1lurer.am .

“The law specifies the circumstances under which political parties should not be allowed to participate in elections. These include issues such as large-scale vote-buying, external direction and similar violations, much of which has been made public by the Anti-Corruption Committee. The Anti-Corruption Committee is a state body, and it is precisely on the basis of information provided by that state body that I will submit my appeal,” Sargsyan said.

Daniel Ioannisyan, coordinator of the Union of Informed Citizens, wrote on Facebook that discussions during the pre-election debate about potentially invalidating the registration of certain political forces prompted his team to examine the legal threshold for such a decision.

“Our team is currently discussing what constitutes the threshold for removing a party from the electoral contest and whether the several dozen disclosures made by the Anti-Corruption Committee concerning Strong Armenia provide sufficient grounds for the CEC to petition a court to invalidate the party’s registration.

The legal definition is as follows: ‘There exists a violation of the established rules of election campaigning that is continuous in nature, and the violation may have a substantial impact on the election results, or the consequences of the violation cannot be remedied, and the violation may have a substantial impact on the election results...’

Now the question is: do you consider that the Anti-Corruption Committee’s findings, taken as a whole, create such grounds?” Ioannisyan wrote.

Earlier, during a televised debate, Aram Sargsyan and Gurgen Simonyan asked Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan why the CEC had allowed political forces associated with Robert Kocharyan and Samvel Karapetyan to participate in the elections.

Pashinyan replied that he had refrained from taking such action himself in order to avoid accusations of exerting pressure on the opposition and advised them to urgently apply to the CEC and request the cancellation of those parties’ registrations.

Sargsyan said he had already raised the issue verbally with the CEC chairman.

“He told me that Armenia’s Central Electoral Commission does not possess the same powers that Moldova’s CEC had,” Sargsyan stated.

In response to Pashinyan’s question about whether he had submitted a written request, Sargsyan said that he would definitely do so the next day. However, later in the debate he added: “Armenia’s independence and peace are under threat, and this is not merely a matter of my applying to the CEC, Mr. Prime Minister.”