Nobody Has Seen Armenia's New Constitution
Nobody has seen this new constitution. Nobody.
Aghajanian opens this exchange with a simple and damaging observation: no one has seen the proposed new constitution that Pashinyan is pushing. Beyond a statement that it will drop the reference to Armenia’s Declaration of Independence, the contents remain unknown. She points out that the text was promised for publication at the end of last year, then promised again for March, and still has not appeared, even as the ruling party seeks support to advance it.
She draws a direct parallel to TRIPP, the transit framework she describes elsewhere in the episode as equally opaque. Both, in her telling, are major commitments charted with input from Azerbaijan and Turkey, pushed forward without the details that any serious legal or public process would require. The comparison sharpens the point: Armenians are being asked to accept binding changes to the state without being shown what they contain.
The constitutional fight is the central domestic battle of the episode. Civil Contract lacks the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to send a new constitution to a referendum, and Aghajanian ties Pashinyan’s urgency to Azerbaijani demands over the Declaration of Independence and to the broader sequence of a so-called peace agreement and the reopening of the Armenia-Turkey border. By framing the debate around a document the public cannot read, she captures why opposition groups and many ordinary Armenians view the process with suspicion. The clip is short, concrete, and built around a question anyone can understand: how can a nation adopt a constitution it has never been allowed to see?
Transcript
Dziunik Aghajanian: Well, first, let's just simply note that nobody has seen this new constitution. And except for the statement that it will not include reference to Armenia's Declaration of Independence, nobody knows what is in this new constitution. And Pashinyan promised it will publish it at the end of last year. They did not do that. They would publish it in March. They did not do it, and now they are trying to get support on something that nobody has seen and nobody knows the details.
Asbed Bedrossian: Right.
Dziunik Aghajanian: It's just like TRIPP, the TRIPP project. Nobody knows it, nobody knows what it is, but