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Sara Petrosyan

Society Begins to Lose Faith in the Public Defender

On September 30, the council of the Chamber of Advocates of the Republic of Armenia heard a report by Misha Piliposyan, the office manager of the Public Defender's  (PD) office on the work done over the past six months and declared it dissatisfactory.  Before hearing the report, the member of the council studied the proceedings of selected public defenders and came to the conclusion that there were, in essence, no proceedings worth noting.

"There is no lawyer's work in those proceedings.  They are just for show, they have just stuck a few documents - an accusatory verdict, the sentence and a couple of other unimportant papers that were handy - together to make it look like something.  What worried me most was that there were grounds for appeal in many of those verdicts, but no appeals were made.  There was only one appeal made in twelve cases of imprisonment that I studied, while there should have been appeals in at least eight of them,” Hayk Alumyan, a member of the council said to his fellow councilmen in the Chamber of Advocates.  The latter came to that conclusion by studying 12 documented proceedings from different public defenders.  Four of them, he said, were more or less adequate, while only one could be called real proceedings.

Hayk Alumyan also concluded that the majority of judicial acts in those cases should have ended in appeals to a higher court, but that was not done and the defendants were left defenseless.  Moreover, the council members had been informed that the public defenders would often force their clients to release them and that they were often forced to sign documents saying that they did not wish to appeal the various judicial decisions taken.  Some public defenders were also involved in other cases, which they did not have the right to do.  "The office manager knew about this but has done nothing to prevent it," Ruben Sahakyan, President of the Chamber of Advocates, informed the council.

Let us remind the reader that the Public Defender's office provides legal assistance to the vulnerable population and is financed through the state budget.  According the Armenian law on advocacy, public defenders provide legal assistance to the financially insecure in three cases of criminal or civil charges - 
1.    Cases of alimony
2.    Cases of mutilation or other cases of assault
3.    Cases of demand for compensation of loss after the death of a breadwinner
Independent of the number of cases handled by a public defender and their quality, the state has allocated each with a monthly salary of 180,000 drams, which is the highest in the CIS.  The distribution of work - which is done by the public defender office manager - has not been done evenly, according to the council.  One of the defenders has had 15 cases in a month, while another has only had 1 and so on, but they have all received equal pay.  The office does not lack in finances, the state has provided it with sufficient funds to defend the rights of the vulnerable population, but because of poor quality work the chamber has had to return 12 million drams to the state in the first half of this year alone.  "Despite that, the budget of the public defender's office has been increased by 50 million drams this year," said the chamber president.

He noted that, besides permanently contracted public defenders, this office should also have temporary staff remunerated on an hourly basis, but this was not being done only because contracts have not been signed with lawyers, and only two of them have worked for hourly pay. It was also revealed that public defenders worked only in the area of their residence, forgetting that the territory that they serve was much larger; they would often not visit their defendants.  The president of the chamber had checked the book of visitations in one Yerevan detention center and discovered that none of the public defenders had seen their clients there over the past 1 month and 8 days.  Statistics show that in some areas, for example the Mashtots District, police do not try to involve public defenders, in contrast to the Kentron District.  This statistic leads to the amusing suggestion that there are more financially insecure people living in the center of Yerevan.

But that did not seem to concern the head of the public defender's office, nor did the fact that many of the vulnerable population were refusing the free legal aid of a public defender.  "I do not see a lack of cases at the public defender's office.  This year, there has been a decrease in the number of people refusing public defenders' aid, which is why there has been a decline in the number of cases," said the director of the public defender's office, Misha Piliposyan.  The decrease in number of refusals, according to him, was a result of a new approach to their work. "We have a new work principle, where public defender's participate in a case when there is a decision by the inspector or judge for them to do so."
The manager of the public defender's office said that previously a written document was enough for public defender's to participate in a case, but there would be many refusals from defendants in those cases.  "Of course, there are refusals now as well.  There are many cases when they reject the public defender in the middle of the case, after charges are presented or even during their opening remarks in court," the office manager did not deny, but added that he felt they were baseless refusals and could not serve as grounds for any conclusions.  According to him, the number of cases with public defenders decreased in the first half of this year because the overall number of criminal cases in the country dropped in that period.  Instead, Piliposyan said that they now received thrice as many letters from detention centers with detainees requesting lawyers in cases where they disagreed with the sentence imposed or declared themselves innocent of any crimes.  This statement by the PD office manager confirmed the thoughts of the council members that detainees were dissatisfied with the work done by public defenders, which is why they continued to write in order to appeal the verdict or have their sentence reduced.

The office manager declared that the participation of public defenders in the Court of Appeals had gone down this year.  In the same period in 2006, they handled 103 cases, where the defendants refused their aid in 20 of them; this year there had been 62 cases with five refusals.  Public defenders appealed fourteen cases to a higher court this year.  According to Piliposyan, the number of appeals has decreased because of improved work in the courts of first instance, while the cases where a public defender has handled in courts of appeal were mainly cases that they were not involved in at the court of first instance.

The council members reminded those present that after the public defender's office was established, two lawyers, Liparit Simonyan and Ara Zakaryan, had worked there for a year conducted serious work at the court of appeals (Liparit Simonyan alone had 62 cases in the court of appeals, i.e. the same amount that all the public defenders in the country combined had had in the first half of this year).  "They had a large numbers of cases in the appeals courts, but then there was a sharp decline," said Alumyan.  The reason, according to Alumyan, was that it no longer suited the judges that they handle all the cases - they presented well-grounded arguments and actively defended their clients.  The judges started persuading the defendants to refuse the aid of public defenders and there came a time when the number of cases issued to them dropped.  "The number of cases that they had declined because their conscientious work, but that is not the reason why the cases have decreased at the public defender's office, but rather the lack of faith in society towards public defenders.  People have started to lose confidence in public defenders.  It would have been better to think that inspectors and judges wanted to keep defendants from public defenders, but I think that it is because of a lack of faith that the number of requests has dropped," added Alumyan.

According to Hayk Alumyan, the reason for the lack of quality in the work of the PD office is that lawyers see becoming public defenders as a way of securing their future pensions.  "You become a public defender and you can live any way you want with a guaranteed monthly salary of 180,000 drams.  Some lawyers see it that way, while others see it as an additional source of income for which you don't have to do any work.  That is to say, he will handle all the cases he normally does but will register his clients as financially insecure, thus getting paid both from them as well as from the state, which will be a bonus of sorts."

Alumyan considered the changes in the PD office - which give the lawyer complete freedom from the body conducting legal proceedings -  positive, in contrast to the earlier situation where the inspector or judge would decide the hourly pay of the public defender.  "We now see the quality of the work done by public defenders.  There are lawyers who work well and have had interesting results.  This is something which would have been meaningless to expect in previous cases of public defense," added the council member.  The latter considered one of the possible ways to improve the work at the PD office to be the admission of young lawyers who had graduated from law school with honors.  After working for two or three years, they would be replaced by newcomers.  In his opinion, there should be few senior lawyers at the PD office; instead, there should be those who do not expect a large income and are ready to conscientiously pass on their experience to the younger generation.

On September 30, the work contract for public defenders expired.  The Chamber of Advocates decided not to extend the public defenders' contracts but rather to hire lawyers to the office who would get a satisfactory score on the examination, especially since the salary of public defenders is slated to be 254,000 drams starting next year.  Of the 53 lawyers taking the exam, twenty received satisfactory scores, of whom nine were previous public defenders.

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