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Sara Petrosyan

Avoiding a precedent

"In 2004, 55 suits demanding confiscation of money were brought against the Republic of Armenia in the courts of Armenia, and the Ministry of Finance and Economy was involved in these cases as either respondent or as a third party," we were informed by the ministry. Ten of the suits against the Ministry of Finances and Economy and other state agencies and departments were brought by individuals, the others by legal entities. The courts complied with 16 suits and according to the verdicts, 50,622,000 drams (about $101,250) will be confiscated from the state budget in favor of the plaintiffs.

The amount of compensation for damages caused by the state is generally considered an important criterion in assessing a country's justice system.

Only four of these suits were claims for compensation. The courts found for the plaintiff in three of them. In one case, expenses related to the burial of a soldier who had been killed were partly compensated. A Yerevan resident won two suits against the state agency Energoinvest and was awarded expenses for the burial of his son who had been killed in a car accident, and the salary his son would have earned. A suit brought by 23-year-old Armen Poghosyan, a resident of the village of Saratovka in the Lori Marz, demanding 34 million drams in compensation for damages caused by his unlawful conviction has been delayed indefinitely.

The state punishes but does not compensate

Armen Poghosyan was charged with the rape and murder of a minor and was sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1999. He spent five years and six months in prison, in place of the real perpetrator of the crime. Armen Poghosyan was acquitted only after the real criminal was caught for committing a similar offense and confessed to the 1999 crime as well. After that, based on an appeal by the Office of the Prosecutor General, the Court of Cassation acquitted Armen Poghosyan on April 2, 2004 , and Prosecutor General Aghvan Hovsepyan, in acknowledgement that Poghosyan's suffering equaled that of the eponymous hero of Dumas'The Count of Monte Cristo , presented him with a copy of the book and set him free. But unlike the hero, who received countless treasures as a result of his years of torment, Armen Poghosyan received nothing from the Republic of Armenia to compensate for the material and physical losses he had suffered.

This is the first time that a person who was unjustly imprisoned has sought compensation for damages. The mere fact that the former convict has made such a demand is in itself a sign of progress from the point of view of awareness of legal rights. So far, two cases of unjust conviction have been known. In both cases the wrongfully convicted people were acquitted only after the real perpetrators of the crime were discovered. In the first case, Tigran Davtyan had been sentenced to 15 years and spent more than a year in prison before it came to light that the murder of the couple he had been convicted for had been committed by other people who had been sentenced in connection with the Dro case.

In other cases, criminal charges have been dropped under various pretexts and the accused have been set free after being kept in jail for almost a year during the preliminary investigation, remaining, figuratively speaking "defendants at large", in order to prevent them from seeking compensation.

The counsel of the Ministry of Finances and Economy has objected to Armen Poghosyan's suit, saying that the calculations he presented are unsubstantiated, and that ex-convict Poghosyan failed to prove that had he not been sent to prison, he would have engaged in farming.

The representative of the Ministry of Finance and Economy has demanded that Poghosyan prove that his eardrum burst as a result of a beating by policemen to make him confess. He has also stated that this will be considered proven only if there is a valid court decision, though no decision of that kind has ever been known to be made. Thus, overturning a sentence and acquitting Poghosyan is not sufficient grounds for to compensate for damages caused to a young man's health as a result of spending five years and six months in prison. Generally speaking, the state's approaches paying compensation for damages in terms of avoiding creating a precedent.

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