Warning: This is a rush transcript generated automatically and may contain errors.
Asbed: Armenia is in full election campaign mode and it’s not a quiet democratic place. What’s going on? Who’s keeping an eye on these things? Hello, everyone.
In this Conversations on Groong episode, we are joined by Dr. Philippe Raffi Kalfayan, who is an international law expert in Paris, France, and has served as Secretary General of the FIDH, the International Federation for Human Rights, and as legal expert to the Council of Europe’s Directorate General for Human Rights and Rule of Law.
Hovik: Specifically, we’ll be talking about the organization that he has founded, which is an observation mission in Armenia. So stay tuned. But before that, my heartfelt request to make sure to like, comment, and share if this content is valuable to you. And of course, we’d appreciate monetary contributions if you can.
The URL for that is podcasts.groong.org. All right, on to the show.
Asbed: Dr. Kalfayan, welcome back to The Groom Podcast.
Raffi: Thank you very much for the invitation.
Hovik: Welcome, Dr. Kalfayan. Last time when we spoke, I mean, shortly after that, we were following the news and we learned about this announcement about an organization that you were partly, or I don’t know, you took part in founding. So we want to talk about that because it’s related to Armenian politics and Armenian elections.
So the organization we’re talking about is IODA, or as Asbed like to say, Yoda. And you’re on the executive board of this organization. And it was set up to, based on the website, it was set up to observe and perhaps act as much as possible to preserve democracy in Armenia. We’re summarizing, we’re paraphrasing.
And of course, with the upcoming June 7 elections, the International Observatory for Democracy in Armenia is currently active. We see you visiting Armenia, we see statements and press releases. So to begin with, why don’t you tell us what IODA is, what was the purpose and some more information about who runs it and anything else you can tell us about the organization.
Raffi: Yeah. Actually, this is my initiative. And so I gathered some colleagues who are, in fact, prominent experts in human rights, in democracy, in rule of law. So people that I have been working with in different fields for many years. the reason why I took this initiative is because the upcoming elections and I think that everybody recognizes are quite crucial they are quite crucial for the future of Armenia because there are many challenging questions at the moment which are debated in the Armenian society in Armenia, but also in diaspora.
In fact, the future is at stake, because if obviously some part of the population in Armenia supports the foreign policy of the current government, Half of the population, maybe more, does not support this foreign policy and the directions taken by this government. In diaspora, the opposition is even stronger. I mean, because we don’t see where this unilateral concession to our neighbors will go. Until when?
Until where? So that’s the first aspect. So this first argument is in fact one personal argument that spoke to me and said, well, If you want to do something, then it’s the right time to do it. And doing this project doesn’t mean, on the contrary, that I’m opposing the ruling party and Pashinyan.
But what I want, at any rate, is that those elections be fair and free. because the trigger point for my decision to go into that project is when the current prime minister said openly, I will not let the opposition come back to power. For me, this is a provocation. This is the challenge. When he said that, I said, OK, then I go and jump into this initiative.
And believe me, this was not an easy decision because I knew it would be a lot of work for me, gathering people, raising some money to fund the travels to Armenia. and entertaining all this communication, PR, and so on. So it was not an easy decision. So once I decided to go, then I gathered, first of all, an executive board.
And in fact, I had the chance that one former colleague Kenneth Roth who is the former executive director of Human Rights Watch accepted immediately without any discussion to jump into this IODA executive board and then I hired some other people, a UK barrister with whom I had worked in the past on a Council of Europe project in Armenia. Sara Leah Whitson, who is a lawyer and former executive director of a US-based NGO called DAWN, She used to be also the former regional director of Human Rights Watch for Middle East. And then I hired Jose Maria Anaras, who is a former high-ranking officer of the UN, human rights branch.
And also William Bourdon, who is a French attorney, very well known worldwide. He’s speaking some very, let’s say, publicized cases. who is also a former executive director of NGOs. The last one was Sherpa. Sherpa is an NGO looking after international economic crimes.
But before that, he was also the Secretary General of the International Federation of Human Rights, just before I took over his position. So all these people are really activist people.
Asbed: They are, of course, all lawyers, but they are activists.
Raffi: And the only one who is not, let’s say an activist, but more a politician is Brian May, a Canadian. So politician who used to be the, so assistant to the Prime Minister Trudeau and former parliamentary group who was in charge of Canadian and Armenian relationship. So all these people accepted quite quickly the initiative because they found it interesting. Why is it interesting for them?
And here I would like to make a correction to what you said, Hovik, before. I mean, the IODA, is observing the pre-election period. In our mission statement, the election day monitoring is not within our scope. So we decided to assess all the electoral climates before the election.
Hovik: Yeah.
Raffi: Why is that? Because we all know that the day of the elections, there may be some frauds, but there are less and less, even in Armenia. So what is more important is to see whether the election will be held in fair conditions. And fair conditions means that all the political forces which are willing to participate in this election can do it freely and without obstacles.
That’s first. And second, whether the judiciary is independent enough to look at fraud cases, if any fraud cases appear during or after the elections. Assessing the democracy is also checking whether the government is not abusing of administrative resources over the other political parties. So all these parameters are very important and they need to be assessed before the elections um because this is where um we the election in fact will take
Hovik: place not not the day of the elections as an observation mission can you tell us you you already made a first visit I think you’re going to go to Yerevan again but can you tell us the I guess, objective overview of your observations that you would like to call out, especially some of the most egregious ones?
Asbed: I think the first delegation was earlier in March, right? So about a month and a half ago.
Raffi: from the 7th to 12th of March, yes. But we were mainly so focusing on all the organizations, parties, state agencies, governments, agencies in Yerevan. So we didn’t move out outside the Yerevan. So the next mission will be in the regions.
So because This is in the region where we can see a lot of pressure from the authorities over the population, through the local governors, through the local landlords, and so on. So we are going into the region in May, indeed. So the major observations are quite traditional observations. First of all, we knew it before, but we have really double checked whether the judiciary is in fact under the control of the government or not.
Obviously it is. There are two indices which are very open. First of all, the Judicial Supreme Council. which is the body in charge of nominating judges, of sanctioning judges, of supervising the ethics, and also supervising the system which randomly allocates cases to the judges. This supreme judicial body is made of 10 people.
Five of them are judges. So they are selected among the community of judges. And five of them are non-judges. They are nominated by the National Assembly.
Since the National Assembly, depends only on the voice of the ruling party, all the non-judge members are in fact nominated by the ruling party. And there is no, so there is no majority, there are 10 people. So you can imagine that the president of a judicial body, who is one of the five judges, is quite crucial. And in the last seven years, they have changed five times This president.
Yes. And the last one was changed upon the request of a prime minister directly by SMS. He asked the president of the body to resign. And the guy resigned the next day.
And so that shows how the judiciary is independent. I mean, constitutionally, this body is independent. But in reality, it is not. And when it comes to the second element, the random selection of judges for cases, it appears that all the politically sensitive cases, especially against journalists or against clergy or against political opponents, There are only two judges who are always selected as judges for those cases.
How come?
Hovik: They should buy lottery tickets.
Raffi: Yeah. So in the end, we understood that the electronic random selection software doesn’t work. This is the explanation we had. So the judiciary is not independent.
So that’s the first point. The second point is the use of administrative resources. So we saw that the official campaign is supposed to start on the 8th of May. So it hasn’t started yet.
But we have seen, even during our presence in Armenia, that Pashinyan was touring around all Armenia, shaking hands with the population, officially because he was visiting the local branches of a ruling party. But in reality, was campaigning also over use of administrative resources that creates imbalance in the competition. He has raised the pensions of everybody on the 1st of April, so two months before the election, by 30%. 30%. He has given extra bonuses to some high-ranking administrative officials, to ministers.
We don’t even know to what level
Hovik: It’s classified as secret.
Raffi: Classified as secret. I mean, all this is a democracy failure. I mean, how come for such important things? And imagine that all those bonuses, all those pension increases have not been voted in the budget of a state that has been adopted by the parliament at the end of 2025.
So this is totally, to some extent, unlawful. And all this is made just a couple of months before the elections. And all this is coming in a global picture where the political parties and candidate parties are limited in resources for their campaign. So the rules are the following.
From the 8th of May to the 6th of June, the candidate parties are allowed, authorized to spend 800 million grams, not more. if they so go behind this limit, so they may be subjected to criminal investigation or by the by the investigative committee or the central electoral commission. And beyond this 800 million grams of the party budgets, which is limited to 1 billion rounds a year. can be spent also for the election campaigning. But that means that an opposition party could have budgeted a maximum of 1 billion and 800 billion drops for over one year for this election.
So you see the imbalance between the administrative resources and the resources authorized for opposition parties.
Hovik: While you’re doing this very important work monitoring the state of affairs before the elections, the current political climate across the world is very polarized. We know that Armenia’s pro-Western and pro-EU direction We’ve seen like EU as an organization intervene, I would say, in many directions, in many elections. We saw Romania, we saw Moldova, we saw Hungary.
And in fact, yesterday, the OSCE ODIHR has opened a formal elections observation mission and met yesterday with the Central Electoral Commission chief. that’s also important because they are actually basically choosing a very very narrow time range to monitor what’s happening meanwhile over the last year we’ve seen a lot of things happen and why this is important OSCE stands for organizations of security and cooperation in Europe with Europe being the key word um do you believe that the other institutional election observation missions, besides IODA, do you have hope that they will also be as impartial as you hope to be, I think, in monitoring these elections?
Raffi: So before answering this question, I would like to add that IODA is made of independent people. They are not remunerated. We all work on a voluntary basis. And I raised some funding for our travels, lodging in Armenia. but not more.
And yes, the only more is that we have an assistant in Yerevan, which I’m paying for her. But this is the only person who is remunerated in this venture. And I raised this money in a diaspora, especially the American Armenian diaspora. So, They are individuals So there is no government funding, there is no organization funding, and we are quite picky about this.
We really want to keep our independence and not be suspected of working for anybody. Because in Armenia, this is very common to be accused on the social networks of be working for Russia, or for working for Europe, or working for such or such political party. This is the traditional allegation that you can see on social networks.
Hovik: And in fact, I believe your organization was also accused. We heard some accusations.
Raffi: Yes, of course. And this is a pity. because it comes from one NGO, actually. And maybe we can talk later about this, but it’s really pitiful. So why I’m saying about, I’m stressing this independence is because The monitoring of the elections in Armenia is made by two kinds of organizations.
One kind is the intergovernmental organizations. So the OSCE are there. This is their traditional mission statement. They do that in every country.
So this is not you. And this is the most experienced in their governmental organization in election monitoring. So they bring experts, MPs, journalists, from across the different countries of OSCE to come and monitor, but the election day. The only added value of ODIHR is that they have a small group of long-term experts.
And in fact, what you have seen yesterday is the announcement of the establishment of this office of long-term experts. So they stay until the days after the election into Armenia. And basically, their mission is to make exactly what we are doing as IODA. But of course, and this is the main difference, is that OSCE is in fact intergovernmental organization.
So this is a diplomatic institution where the Armenian government, of course, has a direct influence The second governmental organization that will monitor is the Council of Europe. So they will also have a bunch of experts for monitoring the election. Actually, they don’t have the same system, they don’t have long-term experts. They have just monitors on the day of elections.
They only send some, let’s say, Council of Europe officers beforehand to assess also, according to their methods, the pre-electoral climate. Besides that, you have the domestic organization, the NGOs. So the Armenian NGOs, some have registered to monitor the elections. So you have actually, you have four groups of NGOs which are registered to monitor the elections.
And as you may imagine, so now we come to the word Europe. Europe is in fact today in a position which is very strange because their position is going against their principles. They are very openly partial in these elections they have decided that the current government has the the right policy foreign policy They are the one who can guarantee the peace and so on and so on.
So for many reasons which are in the interest of Europe, Europe has decided, even if they don’t recognize it, they have decided to support the current government. why why do we say that this is not my assessment but we have seen on the ground during our mission that at the moment at the moment we are speaking there is no proof of any massive influence from Russia over the elections. Nothing. Actually, the criticism which came from a specific NGO in Armenia when we made our press conference was precisely on this point. During the press conference, We have been asked whether we saw some pressure influence from foreign countries.
And we said, no, there is no such pattern. at the moment. They may exist, but they are not visible, they are not massive at the moment. And so somebody said that such information has been spread in the news that there are 80,000 Armenians from Russia who are offered money to come and vote on June the 7th we said well we have read about this but when we met the investigative investigative committee of Armenia so the state committee we asked them the question are you investigating about such a case, I said?
Well we are investigating, we have been in fact informed but we said what is exactly the case are we talking about 80,000 people or less, or 10,000, or 50, or 100. So at the beginning, they didn’t want to answer. But we insisted. I mean, we know exactly how it works.
We were four in the delegation. And so in the end, they accepted to answer something vague. But well, actually, they were investigating about less than 20 people. Okay.
So that shows that the fake news are not necessarily coming from the expected channels. And actually, this is very sad for the NGO community that, yes.
Asbed: Raffi, one of the questions that comes to mind is in your first delegation to Armenia in March, One of the things I noticed is that many of the government agencies had refused or declined to meet with you. Which agency was it that talked to you about investigating these 20 or more people?
Raffi: So, actually, the state agencies accepted to meet with us. So the Central Electoral Committee, the Investigative Committee, and the Anti-Corruption Committee. The three of them accepted. The government didn’t accept.
So the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and also the ruling party, despite our insistence in writing for meeting with them and when a journalist of Azatutyun, Radio
Hovik: Free Liberty, so which is a US-funded organization but…
Asbed: It’s the Voice of America
Raffi: Formerly, formerly. They made an interview of me, by the way. So they said, but we have asked whether the ruling party has received a formal invitation for meeting with them from IODA. They I said no.
I said yes. Well, we have a proof. Please look at the proofs. So you see this is a very nasty and also very short sighted behavior. both from the ruling party and from the ministries.
Because personally, we don’t care. I mean, we don’t take that as an offense. But this is very short sighted from their side to behave like this. Actually, we don’t know any country even more dictatorial that that behaves like this.
Asbed: The reason why I’m interested in knowing this, because that fact investigation platform organization that was accusing you of being a small diaspora based organization that hadn’t met with many people. Well, many of the people that you haven’t met actually declined. to meet with you rather than you did not go around to. So can you give us a little bit more background on this FIP organization? And then I also want to ask you about your organization.
For example, some people will say, well, you’re not asking all the right questions. Where does IODA funding come from? Who are they? What are they doing?
We want to know a little more.
Raffi: Of course, well, FIP is the same organization as the NGO who started to make some campaigning on Facebook against us. Actually, without even checking, our website, the head of this NGO started to say, well, look at these people. Who are they? who is funding their initiative. They are hiding the funding sources.
And everything was on the website when he said that. So he started to disseminate this information on Facebook. We didn’t want to respond because this is making publicity for him and he doesn’t deserve that. And after that, so FIP belongs to the same NGO and with the same head.
Hovik: Yeah, the NGO, if I’m just may, the NGO name is Union of Informed Citizens. Exactly, exactly. And the head is Daniel Ioannisyan. They get millions of dollars every year, and they’re basically the poster boy.
So any project, like the same Daniel Ioannisyan gets money from the Armenian government. They got money from the Armenian government for various projects, including the monitoring the Artsakh elections back in 2019 or 20, I believe. You know, the head of the… organization is also part of the committee that will oversee the constitution
Raffi: rewrite um so hands in multiple parts let’s bypass this issue but for us clearly Daniel or anything where even if sometimes he’s making public statements to denounce some nomination of a judge to the constitutional court, or more recently he denounced other things. These are to show some credibility. In reality, this is what we call in our field a GoNGO. GoNGO means government NGO.
And actually, in fact, you are right. Last year, when I was advocating the case of Armenian prisoners in Baku, at the OSCE in Vienna and Warsaw, Daniel Ioannisyan is there with a lot of staff, and they are obviously, in fact, paid by the government to be there. So the FIP, they call themselves a fact-checking platform. I mean, this was reasonable.
I mean, this was very laughable, what they did. They said, look, the head of IODA, they talk about me, he’s writing so many many articles against the government. So they gave my web link, Armenian Mirror Spectator, with all my articles. I mean, this is not hidden information.
Everybody can check this information about me and about my articles. But the problem is that they don’t read the articles. And if they had read the articles, they could find some other articles where in 2018, I was leading the movement in support of Pashinyan. So this is very laughable and mediocrity.
Hovik: Can I also just, I’m sorry, I want to say something about FIP as well. I mean, they are, by establishing themselves as a fact-checking platform, What happens is that the facts that they check influence Facebook’s policies, influence what Facebook is blocking. All you have to do is just see their statements and they’re very biased. They’re very partial.
But this is what goes for fact checking in Armenia today.
Raffi: Well, there is another platform which has been created recently, where you have different NGOs who have created this platform. I don’t remember the name, but FIP is included inside this. But there are more serious partners. For an example, the regional center for security and democracy.
The organization set up by CVNet and Democracy Watch. So they have created a new fact checking platform where FIP will be included. Hopefully they will make a more professional job. But you’re right, Hovik, this is very worrying that Meta has signed an agreement with the Armenian government to control all the information related to the elections.
And this is not something I’m inventing. This is precisely what the Central Electoral Committee told us. There is a formal framework agreement between the Armenian government and the Central Electoral Committee and META. So they can control all the information going on the META networks.
Asbed: Just to clarify, Raffi, when you talk about META, we’re talking about Facebook and WhatsApp primarily.
Hovik: Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram.
Raffi: WhatsApp and Instagram.
Asbed: That’s right.
Raffi: Yes, of course.
Hovik: While we’re on this topic, I want to just do a shout out. Some of our friends created this Facebook page. It’s called Pasteri Stugman Hartakneri Stugman Hartak. a platform for fact-checking, the fact-checking platforms. I mean, it’s a pun on the FIP, and they actually go and fact-check every single one of FIP’s facts.
And we will include a link in the show notes. For those, I would urge everyone who’s watching this to subscribe and follow that. But again, this is not really related to IODA, so I’m sorry for stealing your thunder, Philippe. Continue.
Asbed: Raffi, I’m not done talking about the Union of Informed Citizens and Daniel Ioannisyan. Over the past few days, they have accused, I would say, The civil contract party and Pashinyan’s campaign that the tour, the VarchaBand tour that they put together, the concert tour, was actually a campaign event and should not have been paid by civil contract related banks that have been funneling the money into it. I thought, well, that’s interesting that they would talk about something like this.
But on the flip side of that coin, they are apparently also investigating that the April 24th procession, the Torchlight procession, was a Dashnaktsakan campaign, an ARF campaign, and they want the ARF to pay for that. If you can be more ridiculous than this, let me know. But let me ask you a question…
Raffi: I will finish on this because in the same attack about IODA, they also found out that the person who is actually our assistant for IODA is a former parliamentary assistant. So secretary of the former MP. And I mean, this is really- An MP from Civil Contract. No, no, it was not from this Contract.
It was from the Hayastan faction. But you see this is very deleterious. I mean, this is… disgusting such methods. But unfortunately, this is the level we have today in Armenia.
So the mediocrity is such that this is really worrying. And I would like to also come back to other things which have been contracted with Europe. The CEC, so the Central Electoral Committee, has also got some digital tools to track all the false information going on on social networks. So the EU has provided them some specific tools for that.
And as you know, upon the request from the Armenian government, they are now sending rapid response teams to counter the alleged influence campaign coming from nobody knows from where, but it is construed that it is Russia. Okay. All this in fact is part of the things we have observed because that shows that there is a real plan to eliminate any chance for the opposition forces to come to power or even to challenge the majority of the civil contract party at the elections. The goal of the civil contract party of Pashinyan is not to come first out of the polls, But he wants the absolute majority and continue to rule like he does today.
I mean, without opposition, without opposition, which can play a role in debates. I mean, the parliament since five years is is just useless because there is no debate.
Asbed: Yeah, it’s a rubber stamp body.
Raffi: Yes. I even wonder why the opposition parties didn’t leave the parliament since so much time. I mean, they are useless. There is no discussion.
Each draft bill which is presented by the ruling party is adopted with or without
Hovik: the votes of opposition. Even the major committees in the parliament, they removed whoever they don’t like from the opposition. They removed as heads of the committee, even though they’re constitutionally bound to give some seats to the opposition there.
Raffi: This is a lack of democracy. Look, I don’t know in the US how it works, because this is quite different. You have state assemblies and you have the Congress and the Senate. But in France, for example, even the most minor opposition faction is provided the chairing of some parliamentary commissions.
Even the Finance Commission of the National Assembly of France is provided to the opposition. It’s not in the hands of a majority. This is what we call democracy. In Armenia, that does not have.
That doesn’t exist. That’s right.
Asbed: Yeah. Raffi, given what we have talked about, the EU’s interference funding, so-called, what’s the term? Hybrid wars. On Armenia’s elections and such things.
What’s your take on the OSCE ODIHR mission? Can it be considered fair, balanced assessments of, I mean, do you have any concerns about their vision, what they are going to see and what they’re not going to see in these elections and how they’re going to report on these things?
Raffi: Well, OSCE is doing its job. I mean, there is no reason to complain about it. But the OSCE has the ground people who are doing their job. And then the report is made by the political branch of OSCE.
And this is where there is a problem. because the final conclusion is made by the political branch. So the political branch means the OSCE political direction, even for the OSCE So, Secretary General, we spoke with him two days ago, told us, well, you know, we are a pluralistic organization. In our membership, we have Russia and other countries like Belarus or Central Asian countries, so they are not necessarily European, but everybody knows. that OSCE is Western minded. And in this case, this is not exactly a support of incumbent government, but they support definitely the peace agreement between Azerbaijan and Armenia.
The one that doesn’t exist yet. That doesn’t exist yet, exactly. But they want to believe that it exists and they support this. And so we had a very interesting discussion.
But there is no opposition party who wants the war. There is none. Armenia cannot afford a war. And there is no opposition party at the moment who is saying we are going at war.
They are just saying that in order to have a sustainable peace, we need to go through. A dignified peace. Yes. We need such and such steps to be taken.
And this is where the OSCE or EU are… dumped, they don’t want to hear about this. And our role as independent experts is in fact to have that kind of discussion with these organizations. They know us, they respect us, even if they They have a political direction, but they need to hear this and to take into account what we are saying. Because in the end, we are putting in front of their eyes some truths.
And if something happens in the future, they will not be able to say, well, we didn’t know. We didn’t know.
Asbed: Right. Well, as I said, what they will see and what they will not see, it seems like a very political decision. And even if they know something and they don’t act on it, I don’t know where that goes. So given all your concerns about the environment that we’re talking about leading into the election, what practical steps can you take to help?
Raffi: Well, there is no miracle. I mean, we are just here to to alert, to inform, to report, to meet with all these institutions, to tell them, be aware there are worrying signs. make sure that no opposition party will be cancelled and eliminated from the race to the election. And in fact, the biggest challenger today, who is Samvel Karapetyan, is, he’s held in pre-trial detention, it’s home arrest at the moment but still he cannot go out of his home and And everybody knows that there are not serious charges against him, actually not the ones that the government would like to indict him with.
So this is an obvious obstacle for Karapetian to be in the competition. And so this is a mistake from the Europeans to not be more active on this.
Hovik: Can I just clarify, so we have all of these evidences of church leaders being jailed, the main opposition leader being jailed, and the EU is already, with all that evidence in front of them, they’re saying, well, so far it’s going great? Is that the gist of their message?
Raffi: They don’t say that. They say, well, there are some in fact failures in the Armenian democracy, but Armenia is the… compared to Georgia and Azerbaijan is the most democratic and we need to support it. And we need to support it because Armenia wants to make peace with Azerbaijan. This is the official speech.
Everybody knows that In reality, they don’t care for the Armenian democracy. They care for securing their interests in the regions. So it means having these free trade corridors between Central Asia and Europe. And that’s all.
That’s all what they care for.
Hovik: What would the Armenian government need to do right now in order for the elections not to be called unfree and unfair? What would be some of the actions that you would like to see from them?
Raffi: You know that on May 4th and 5th, there is this European political community meeting, followed by the EU-Armenia partnership meeting. Of course, those summits are not accidental. They are timely, they are events made for showing support to the incumbent government, the The one who has launched this European political community summit is President Macron from France. He started to to organize these summits after the invasion of Russia in Ukraine.
And they organize meetings, summits in countries where there is in fact reason to counter influence of Russia. So they did it in Moldova before the elections. They do it now in Armenia before the elections. So this is, of course, a foreign influence less manifest than the one that has been showed by James. events when he went to Armenia because JD Vance was very direct, he said Pashinyan is our candidate we want him to stay so at the head of a country so there was no even doubt about ambiguity.
Asbed: Yeah, yeah, I think he also said that about Victor Orbán
Raffi: Well, let’s talk later about this. Yes, yes, that’s true, that’s true. But that’s a sign that the Hungarian people didn’t so let them influence by that kind of speeches. And precisely, I hope that Armenians could do the same, but I’m not sure of that.
And so this is, let’s say, the positive point that this summit is for Pashinyan. But the good thing for the opposition is that the incumbent government will not take a serious step against the opposition parties before May 5th. But after the summit, we can see some other actions. Actually, I don’t believe that they will take actions without events.
So they will probably create events, they will make some provocations in order to be able to prohibit some candidates or some parties to compete in the race to re-elections. But I hope they will not do that step, they will not take that step, but everything is possible.
Hovik: You mentioned just the EPC. Is it possible that we can have some surprises at this meeting? Are there any voices of sanity that will be present that will publicly or maybe privately strongly raise this issue with the Armenian government while they’re in Yerevan?
Raffi: I have no doubt about this. I have no specific information. I have no doubt that such voices and action will be taken because precisely all this Armenian society which is not sharing the views of the government will voice out during these summits. But remember that Armenia is going to take very strict police measures during the summit.
You will have police everywhere in the city. Many, many streets will be totally closed. They have already announced about this.
Hovik: Yeah, in fact, the schools are canceled and children had to go to school on a Saturday so that May 4th and 5th would be a holiday for them?
Raffi: So you can see, I mean, we are, it will be, let’s say, no man’s land inside Armenia. So all these delegates from foreign countries will not be able to meet with local people. So it will be a totally closed door summit. But of course, you will have a lot of cameras and TV stations and a lot of propaganda about it.
That’s all. This is how I see that.
Asbed: Okay. I guess we are going to leave it there for today. Dr. Kalfayan, we’re going to try and catch up with you maybe one more time before the elections and see how things are going.
But for today, thank you so much for sharing your experience and the experience of your organization with our listeners. Thank you very much.
Raffi: Thank you, Dr. Kalfayan. Thank you, Robic.
Asbed: That’s our show today. This episode was recorded on April 24, 2026. Hovik and I are doing the work of the nation on this day of commemoration of the Armenian genocide, which was launched 111 years ago, April 24, 1915. And to this day, we remember and we demand.
We’ve been talking with Dr. Philippe Raffi Kalfayan, who is a lawyer based in Yerevan. He lectures on international law and is a former Secretary General of the FIDH, the International Federation of Human Rights. Dr.
Kalfayan has served as Secretary General of the FIDH and as legal expert for the Council of Europe’s Directorate General for Human Rights and the Rule of Law. We’re going to put all of these links in our show notes. podcasts.groong.org/episode-number. We’ll have links to their organization. We’ll have whatever links and articles we have for you in there.
Check it out.
Hovik: Yeah. And as always, like, comment, share, and at minimum, make sure you’re subscribed. And if you want to donate some money, go to podcasts.groong.org/donate.
Asbed: Wonderful. I’m Asbed Bedrossian in Los Angeles.
Hovik: And I’m Hovik Manucharyan. We’ll talk to you soon, folks. Bye-bye.