Acquitted After 2.7 Years in Jail
He served more time than he would have if found guilty.
This was a big story of the week. Armenia’s Anti-Corruption Court of Appeals acquitted former Vanadzor mayor Mamikon Aslanyan on the main charge against him, a municipal land corruption case, and the other charges were dropped as well. By then he had already spent more than two and a half years, roughly two years and seven months, in detention.
Hovik makes the point that at one stage it was calculated that Aslanyan had served more time in pretrial detention than he would have received had he actually been found guilty. The charges, he argues, were frivolous from the start, brought only because Aslanyan won the mayoral election, and the case disrupted the functioning of the Vanadzor municipality and the lives of Aslanyan and his close relations. That even Armenian courts rejected the case, without it reaching the European Court of Human Rights, tells you how weak it was.
Asbed widens the lens to the system itself, describing pretrial detention as a Pashinyan purgatory with no judicial end: detentions can be renewed every two months, a person can be released near the one-year mark and brought right back, because there is no independent judiciary. He stresses the human cost, two and a half years is a significant portion of a life, a disrupted family, and no recourse before the charges are quietly dropped. Hovik calls it a dictatorship in plain terms. The clip ties together the episode’s threads on political prisoners, selective law enforcement, and judicial independence in Armenia, and it works as a stand-alone story of how prolonged pretrial detention functions as punishment regardless of guilt.
Transcript
Hovik Manucharyan: But they were able to put him in detention for 2.7 years. And I think at one point they calculated that he had actually served more time in detention than he would have gotten had they actually found him guilty. So not only did they keep him in jail, not only were the charges frivolous, but they actually, overall, they him under detention for more than the period that he would have gotten had he been
Asbed Bedrossian: Well, we've said this before.
Hovik Manucharyan: found guilty.
Asbed Bedrossian: This pretrial detention hell is basically Pashinyan
Hovik Manucharyan: Yeah.
Asbed Bedrossian: purgatory. There's no judicial end to it. You can just keep renewing this for every two months. And if it comes up to a year, you can let the guy go and then bring him right back because there's no free judiciary. You're right to say that it affected all of the municipal of Vanadzor. But I'm also thinking about the life of a man. Two and a half years is a significant portion of the life. His family was disrupted, and there's absolutely no recourse. And then they finally just wake up one morning, and the judge says, charges dropped, and the rest of them is just like, it's been too long, we can't deal with it anymore, goodbye, you're free. That is just unacceptable.