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Themes: Right to free elections Armenien

Sarukhanyan v. Armenia  | 2008

An election candidate’s unfair disqualification leads to new rules on property declarations

Without fair elections, there can be neither a fair judiciary nor a fair state.

Gagik Sarukhanyan - Photo: Gagik Sarukhanyan (private collection)

Background

Election authorities disqualified a political hopeful because they said he had broken the rules by falsifying his property declaration when registering as a candidate.

Gagik Sarukhanyan had initially put himself forward for the 2003 parliamentary election, but the local electoral commission later annulled his registration for having failed to declare a flat he shared with his family.

Property records showed Gagik was a joint-owner of the flat – a claim he denied.

Gagik challenged the electoral commission’s decision before an Armenian court, claiming he had not falsified any documents and that the formerly state-owned flat had been privatised in his mother’s name in the 1990s. A certificate from the time stated she was the sole owner of the flat.

However, the Armenian court dismissed Gagik’s case, ruling that the electoral commission had been right to annul his registration as a candidate.

Judgment of the European Court of Human Rights

The European court found a violation of Gagik’s electoral rights.

While by this time Gagik accepted that, under Armenia’s privatisation law, he was legally a joint owner of the flat, he maintained that the authorities had previously given him documents stating the opposite.

The European court found that Gagik had “good reason to believe that the information [he submitted] was accurate”. The privatisation rules and procedures were, in the court’s view, “not sufficiently clear” and “misleading".

There was insufficient evidence to back up Armenia’s claim that Gagik had falsified his property declaration, the court found.

Follow-up

In response to the European court’s judgment in Gagik’s case, Armenia changed the Electoral Code in 2011 so that election candidates no longer need to declare property and income as part of their registration. Such information should be submitted after, and not before, registration.

Since the change in the law, there is no sanction for failing to declare property and income. Such declarations are simply intended for transparency purposes.

The Armenian government also made legal changes to improve the appeal mechanism concerning alleged violations of electoral rights. Election candidates are now entitled to challenge actions (or inaction) by electoral commissions before higher bodies and both the administrative and constitutional courts.

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