Armenian investigators on Thursday charged former President Robert Kocharyan with usurping power and filed a court motion to arrest him, the special investigation service said.

The move comes three months after a power change in the ex-Soviet country following weeks of mass protests against corruption and cronyism.

Kocharyan served as Armenia’s second president from 1998 to 2008 and investigators have charged him with an attempt to overthrow the constitutional order during post-election events in March 2008, when his ally Serzh Sarksyan was elected the next president.

In February-March 2008 the opposition held protest rallies, contesting the results of the election and claiming that their candidate, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had won the vote.

The protests were dispersed and 10 people were killed in clashes with police. The Constitutional Court upheld the election results.

Nikol Pashinyan, an opposition activist at the time who was imprisoned in June 2009 on charges of fomenting unrest during post-election protests, was elected prime minister by parliament on May 8 this year.

Kocharyan said the latest charges were politically motivated, but added he was ready to spend time in prison.

“These charges are fiction, fabricated, unjustified and have a political implication,” he told an independent Armenian Yerkir Media TV.

Kocharyan also said the most likely development was his arrest, but he did not intend to run away.

“I’m going to go sit in prison and fight to the end.”
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The Moscow lawyer said to have promised Donald Trump’s presidential campaign dirt on his Democratic opponent worked more closely with senior Russian government officials than she previously let on, according to documents reviewed by The Associated Press.

Scores of emails, transcripts and legal documents paint a portrait of Natalia Veselnitskaya as a well-connected attorney who served as a ghostwriter for top Russian government lawyers and received assistance from senior Interior Ministry personnel in a case involving a key client.

The data were obtained through Russian opposition figure Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s London-based investigative unit, the Dossier Center, that is compiling profiles of Russians it accuses of benefiting from corruption. The data were later shared with journalists at the AP, the Swiss newspaper Tages-Anzeiger, Greek news website Inside Story and others.

The AP was unable to reach Veselnitskaya for comment. Messages from a reporter sent to her phone were marked as “read” but were not returned. A list of questions sent via email went unanswered.

Veselnitskaya has been under scrutiny since it emerged last year that Trump’s eldest son, Donald Jr., met with her in June 2016 after being told by an intermediary that she represented the Russian government and was offering Moscow’s help defeating rival presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

‘Independent’ operator

Veselnitskaya has denied acting on behalf of Russian officialdom when she met with the Trump team, telling Congress that she operates “independently of any government bodies.”

But recent reporting has cast doubt on her story. In an April interview with NBC News, Veselnitskaya acknowledged acting as an “informant” for the Russian government after being confronted with an earlier batch of emails obtained through the Dossier Center.

The new documents reviewed by AP suggest her ties to Russian authorities are close — and they pull the curtain back on her campaign to overturn the sanctions imposed by the U.S. on Russian officials.

The source of the material is murky. Veselnitskaya has previously said that her emails were hacked. Khodorkovsky told AP he couldn’t know where the messages came from, saying his group maintained a series of anonymous digital drop boxes.

The AP worked to authenticate the 200-odd documents, in some cases by verifying the digital signatures carried in email headers. 

In three other cases, individuals named in various email chains confirmed that the messages were genuine. Other correspondence was partially verified by confirming the nonpublic phone numbers or email addresses they held, including some belonging to senior Russian officials and U.S. lobbyists.
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Thousands of people staged protests across Poland on Thursday after President Andrzej Duda signed into law a measure effectively letting the government choose the next Supreme Court chief.

The European Union, human rights groups and opposition parties in Poland say the legislation and other changes pushed by the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party undermine judicial independence and democracy.

Crowds gathered outside the presidential palace in Warsaw chanting “shame.” Many held candles and pens, referring to Duda’s readiness to sign. They shouted, “Break the pen” and “You will go to prison.”

Similar protests took place in more than two dozen cities and towns across Poland.

The PiS party says an overhaul is needed to make the courts more efficient and eradicate the influence of Poland’s communist past.

“Without [judiciary] reforms, we cannot rebuild the Polish state so that it serves its citizens,” said Jaroslaw Kaczynski, leader of the euroskeptic party which combines left-leaning economics with nationalist politics.

Earlier this month, 22 Supreme Court judges were forced into early retirement but chief judge Malgorzata Gersdorf has refused to go, saying her constitutional term does not expire until 2020.

The latest amendment, which was adopted by the upper house of parliament earlier this week, is designed to make it easier to name the new Supreme Court head.

Since PiS won power in 2015, dozens of judges have been effectively dismissed from the Constitutional Tribunal, the National Judiciary Council, which decides judicial appointments, and now the Supreme Court.

New appointments have used procedures that give parliament, where the PiS has a majority, greater say over the courts and the government more control over judges.

The European Commission is running an unprecedented rule of law investigation and has opened several separate legal cases against Poland, the largest former communist EU state, including some over the Supreme Court.
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The deputy prime minister of Armenia’s new elected government says officials in Yerevan are continuing the anti-corruption campaign launched after Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan rode to power on a wave of mass demonstrations earlier this year.

In an exclusive interview with VOA, Armenian Deputy Prime Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said Pashinyan’s administration has spared nothing in their efforts to end decades of high-level graft and entrenched bribery, extortion, nepotism and fraud.

“When the revolution started, we put everything on the table — everything,” Mirzoyan told VOA’s Armenian Service. “We were ready, and we realized that if we fail, we at least will be imprisoned for years. But that didn’t prevent us. We never doubted. We’ve never been afraid and never surrendered. And there is no power that can stop us.”

Since assuming office in May 2018, Pashinyan, a former opposition lawmaker whose May 2018 rise to power was fueled by populist resentment over cronyism and poor governance under ex-president Serzh Sargsyan, ordered a series of raids and arrests that predominantly targeted members of the former ruling party.

Following one raid in late June, Gen. Manvel Grigoryan, a member of parliament from the former ruling party, was stripped of immunity. Lawmakers supported a prosecutor’s motion to launch criminal proceedings against him.

Grigoryan, who fought in a war between Azerbaijan and Armenian-backed fighters over the breakaway region of Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s, was arrested after the National Security Service released footage of the raid on his home, where large quantities of weapons, food and ammunition were confiscated.

Prosecutors also suspect Grigoryan, who is the head of Armenia’s largest organization of war veterans, of misappropriating state goods and donations for the army, charges that he denies.

Although the majority of probes involve former ruling party officials, the anti-corruption campaign is not an act of political revenge, Mirzoyan said.

“This is not our fault that the 99 percent of all discoveries deal with people from a certain political party,” he said. “That is the party that has been in power. That is the party that refused to transfer the power. That is the party that used all levers to extend their personal power. There is no intent there, rather just statistics. We said that there will be no political vendetta, and we are confident in that.”

Mirzoyan also addressed criticism of the new government, which consists mostly of people in their 30s, acknowledging that some may lack the depth of experience possessed by former administrations.

“Yet, if we talk about real-life situations, the problem is that there were very experienced rogues, experienced corrupt officials,” he said. “So, is it better to bring in inexperienced newcomers, who have good [moral] values and will do everything … to implement these values? Or is it better to be a ‘hostage’ of experienced rogues and corrupt officials? For me, the answer is obvious.”

On the foreign policy front, Mirzoyan reiterated Yerevan’s insistence that the new government will remain a strategic partner to Russia.

“There is a stereotype that the democratic state must be pro-Western, while less progressive regimes are leaning towards the other centers [of power],” he said. “In my opinion, Armenian revolution — a democratic, nonviolent revolution — proves that that is merely a stereotype.”

Yerevan does, however, wish to develop relations with the West, said Mirzoyan, adding that Pashinyan is planning to participate in the upcoming U.N. General Assembly, where he hopes to discuss expanded bilateral cooperation with U.S. leaders.

Despite recent opinion pieces in Russian state media portraying Pashinyan’s overtures to Western nations as “unfaithful to Moscow,” Mirzoyan insisted that democratic rule in Yerevan will persist, independent of its foreign ties.

“We moved … in the direction of democracy. And on our way to build that democratic society, we [did not] receive instruction from anyone. … Neither have we needed anyone’s approval,” he said, emphasizing that neither Western nor Russian partners are influencing the new government’s policies.

Armenian Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan, who also spoke with VOA on Tuesday, said the Pashinyan government still enjoys popular domestic support in the wake of recent anti-corruption probes.

This story originated in VOA’s Armenian Service. VOA correspondent Arman Tarjimanyan contributed reporting from Washington. Karine Kocharyan contributed reporting from New York.

 
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The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, is seeking access to Cameroon to verify what he says are alarming reports of horrific abuse by separatist and government forces in the country’s English-speaking Northwest and Southwest regions.

The U.N. human rights office said the situation in Cameroon’s English-speaking communities has worsened considerably since protests against what the English-speakers see as structural discrimination started two years ago.

The Anglophones are demanding an end to what they allege is their economic and political marginalization by the country’s Francophone majority.

The High Commissioner’s spokeswoman, Ravina Shamdasani, told VOA what began as protests for greater access to jobs and linguistic equality has gotten out of hand. She said violence by both armed separatists and the government has spiraled out of control.

“The violent separatists, these armed groups are killing people, torching schools, carrying out kidnappings and extortion and all sorts of horrible human rights abuses to try to disrupt the situation,” she said. “The government’s role should be to protect people in such a horrible environment. Instead, the government is employing a heavy-handed response, which is not helping the situation. It is further causing human rights violations.”

United Nations figures show more than 21,000 refugees have fled to neighboring countries, while some 160,000 people are internally displaced by the violence, with many reportedly hiding in forests.

An army spokesman has rejected charges of abuses by the security forces as “rumors.”

Shamdasani said there is a lot of misinformation and propaganda on both sides. She added that the High Commissioner has asked that monitors be allowed to verify allegations of abuse against both security forces and armed separatists.

The government has rejected this request, she said. Consequently, she added that the U.N. human rights office will have to consider other options to keep tabs on the situation, including remote monitoring.
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