WUNRN
Institute for War & Peace
Reporting - IWPR
ARMENIA - SLOW PROGRESS ON DOMESTIC
VIOLENCE LAW
Specific legislation is nearly ready, but campaign groups say there is no political will to drive it through.
By Mary Aleksanyan - 26 Nov 2012
Until a specific law is enacted, they say,
it will be hard to prosecute offenders and protect vulnerable women.
In one high-profile case, Haykunash
Mikaelyan is currently on trial for abusing her daughter-in-law Mariam
Gevorkyan. Prosecutors were able to file criminal charges because actual injury
had taken place.
Last year, Gevorgyan returned to
“They were always finding new reasons to
beat me – ‘you slammed the door’, or ‘you did the housework too slowly’. If I
complained, they beat me for talking too much,” she said.
Her husband David Ziroyan was prosecuted
but was later freed under a general amnesty.
Mikaelyan denies any wrongdoing and says
the broken nose, bruises and burns that Gevorkyan had when she returned to
Rights activists have held daily
demonstrations outside the court in Artashat where the Gevorkyan case is being
heard, to demand that it take place in open rather than closed session.
Gevorkyan’s lawyer Nona Galstyan said the
fact that domestic abuse had to be dealt with under general criminal law rather
than as a particular offence made it much harder to win court cases.
“The absence of a law means that female
victims of domestic violence are often left defenceless. The police will not
launch a criminal case unless serious injury or death has taken place,” she
said.
Lara Aharonyan, head of the Women’s
Resource Centre, agreed, saying, “If there was a law, it would be far easier to
prosecute cases like Mariam’s and others. At the moment, we have a very limited
number of legal options.”
There are no statistics on the number of
women who suffer abuse in the home. The only figures came out of a 2009 survey
backed by the United Nations Population Fund. A quarter of respondents said
they suffered psychological abuse, nine per cent said they were assaulted, and
three per cent said they suffered sexual violence.
The non-government Women’s Rights Centre
gave higher totals based on its own findings, in which 66 per cent of respondents
reported psychological abuse and 30 per cent domestic violence.
Between January and September this year,
700 women called the centre’s hotline to report cases of physical, sexual or
psychological abuse.
The Women’s Resource Centre drafted a law
on domestic violence in 2007 and submitted it to the labour and social affairs
ministry two years later.
Its head Aharonyan says the murder of
20-year-old Zaruhi Petrosyan in 2010 created new impetus to move things
forward.
Petrosyan endured two years of assault
during her two years of marriage. In October 2011, her husband Yanis Sarkisov
was sentenced to ten years in prison for her murder.
The case prompted seven NGOs to form a
coalition to press the authorities to pass the law.
“Zaruhi’s death, while tragic, really
helped to raise the issue of domestic violence all across
The labour and social affairs ministry
began serious work on the issue in May 2011, setting up a working group.
This coincided with a report from the
United Nations Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women, which accused the Armenian authorities of doing too little to
curb domestic abuse.
On November 13, 2012, the ministry finally
published a draft bill for public discussion.
In its present form, the law would allow
courts to impose tougher penalties for domestic violence and give police new
mechanisms for preventing it, such as issuing formal warnings and intervening
directly. Police would be able to impose 72-hour exclusion orders while they
looked into a case, and courts could then extend this.
“We are not late; we are approving this law
right on time,” insisted Lala Ghazaryan, head of the ministry’s department for
women and children. “It’s a very serious problem and drafting the bill has been
extremely labour-intensive.”
However, deputy minister Filaret Berikyan
warned of further hold-ups because the bill would need to comply with a new
Council of Europe convention on domestic violence.
“Our country intends to join the convention
in future, and that means the law would have to be amended anyway,” he said.
Davit Amiryan, deputy director of Open
Society
“Time after time, they find new reasons not
to submit this law to the government and parliament for approval.,” he said.
“In May 2010, the Armenian representative in
Amiryan said the key to progress was for
officials to acknowledge the problem, which meant “viewing it from a rights
perspective, not as something to do with history, culture, traditions or
religion. If we don’t view it as a violation of human rights, then we’re never
going to resolve it.”