Today Anna Vardapetyan, Prosecutor General, participated in the conference entitled “Justice as a Tool for Achieving Fairness” organized by the Ministry of Justice.

The leaders of the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the Republic of Armenia, representatives of the community of lawyers and civil society and others participated in the conference chaired by Nikol Pashinyan, Prime Minister of the Republic of Armenia.

During the first part of the panel discussion, Prosecutor General of the Republic of Armenia, in her speech, referred to the terms of prosecutorial supervision and control over the preliminary examination, the necessity to direct the resources to the examination of “high-profile” cases,  the assignment to ensure proper prosecutorial supervision over compliance with the deadlines defined for conducting expert examinations, complying with the reasonable deadlines of pursuing a charge at the court, etc.

In this context Anna Vardapetyan particularly mentioned the following, “The analysis of statistical data showed that about 66,7%  of criminal proceedings completed at the preliminary investigation stage during 2022-2024 were examined within 4 months. Based on this starting point, an assignment was given to all the subdivisions of the Prosecutor’s Office to request the materials of the proceedings from the body conducting the proceedings no later than every four months, to verify the appropriateness of conducted preliminary investigation, and, if necessary, to apply prosecutorial measures. To avoid errors conditioned by human factor in meeting the specified deadlines, digital, statistical program “Report on the Prosecutor’s work” was developed and introduced. This program is a tool to check online the workload of each prosecutor and each subdivision of the Prosecutor’s Office, the number of proceedings under the direct supervision of each prosecutor, the number of prosecutorial acts and what is more important it provides automatic reminders (including to the supervisors) regarding the deadlines defined by the assignment stated by me”.

During the second part of the panel discussion Aram Aramyan, Deputy Prosecutor General referred to the process of selection of measures of restraint, stating that during 2023 detention was chosen as a measure of restraint under 4.02% of the criminal proceedings and under 3.87% of the proceedings during 2024.

Referring to the judgments of acquittal, Deputy Prosecutor General mentioned that judgments of acquittal were rendered under 1.8% of completed cases, which, inter alia, is conditioned by the fact that the quality of examination of criminal proceedings, prosecutorial supervision and pursuit of charges increased, criminal proceedings with weak evidence base were not submitted to the court, in this regard, also attaching importance to the judicial practice developed by the Court of Cassation.