The Ministry of Justice is already preparing the text of the new Constitution and cooperating with the council. Deputy Minister of Justice Tigran Dadunts announced this at a briefing with journalists today.

Radar Armenia spoke with constitutional expert Ara Ghazaryan on the topic.

- Although the Constitutional Reform Council has not yet adopted a concept, Mr. Ghazaryan has already begun working on developing the text of the new Constitution. How effective can this option be?

- A new concept would be desirable. I am writing out an idea, but December is tough. The decisions are probably made on the fly. You must understand what the Constitution needs to change to have a concept. There is no idea about that either. For example, if you ask me, I will say that the Constitution should not be amended so often.

- Is there any procedure for changing the Constitution?

- Now, there is a working group. First, a concept should be adopted, then, based on it, the text should be developed, and then it should be put to a referendum. If it is adopted, we will have a new constitution once again. The Constitution has changed, first of all, due to the presence of public demand. It is not known whether there is such a demand or not. That is why the concept is needed. It would be good if scientists, constitutional experts, and not politicians spoke about changing the Constitution first. We need to understand what we want to change. The main argument is that none of the previous constitutions are legitimate, but that is not a sufficient argument. The most important thing is to understand what is preventing us from progressing. Some public discussions are taking place on this, not continuously but intermittently, but there is no unified opinion on what we want to change. For example, in 2005, when we decided to adopt a constitution, the main reason was that we had joined the Council of Europe, and indeed, the 1995 constitution did not allow us to make such changes to the laws that the Council of Europe had put forward to Armenia as a condition. We had a solemn political and international obligation, which we could not fulfill if we did not amend the Constitution. Now, it is not known what the main reason for the change is.

- Can the preamble be changed in the new Constitution?

- 2 articles in the Constitution are unchanged; they must be preserved. We are talking about the first and second articles. There is already a decision of the Constitutional Court regarding the preamble, which is that the wording in the preamble regarding the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh does not apply to the norms. The preamble refers to the Declaration of Independence, and the Declaration of Independence contains a clause regarding the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. According to the Constitutional Court decision, the reference to the Declaration of Independence does not imply that all the norms of our Constitution must necessarily express the idea of ​​the independence of Nagorno-Karabakh. In other words, no reference to Nagorno-Karabakh needs to be made in the preamble of the following Constitution as a guideline. In the preamble of the new Constitution, there must necessarily be a reference to the Declaration of Independence; it is interpreted in such a way that not all the principles mentioned in the declaration must necessarily be expressed in the norms of the Constitution.

Angela Poghosyan