According to constitutional law expert Hrayr Tovmasyan, Turkey is not playing with an open deck when it comes to Armenian-Turkish relations. “Turkey wants to see these relations tied to a settlement of the Karabakh conflict. If Ankara wasn’t declaring this openly in the past, now, both the prime minister and foreign minister are raising the issue for all to see,” Mr. Tovmasyan stated at a press conference today. The expert noted that President Sargsyan’s recent threat of nullifying the Protocols, and that he had directed the appropriate bodies to draft the appropriate legislation that would permit such a move, was based on the fact that Armenian law contained no such mechanism. When asked if he thought the parliament would simply fail to ratify the Protocols, instead of President Sargsyan recalling his signature, Mr. Tovmasyan stated that non-ratification was the more ‘passive’ approach to dealing with the matter since it left open the possibility that the documents could be ratified at some time in the future. “When the presidential signature is withdrawn it means that one is putting a halt to the entire process,” he stated, adding that the Armenian side had sent an indirect message to Ankara that it would not tolerate any Turkish attempts to link the two issues of Karabakh and normalization of relations.