Constitution must have a clear guarantor, Armenian expert insists
The Constitution must have a clear guarantor not to give rise to various interpretations and misrepresentations, the chair of the Constitutional Law Department of the Yerevan State University, Vardan Ayvazyan insisted at a conference titled “The Constitution of Armenia: Red and Green Lines” on Thursday.
He stated the presidential system of government makes clear that the president is the guarantor of the Constitution.
“When we switched to the parliamentary system of government, the institute of the constitutional guarantor was seemingly pushed out, and the president was assigned the functions of not a guarantor of the Constitution, but a supervisor, which were vague,” the expert said.
Ayvazyan said as a matter of fact, the parliamentary system allows the president not to be the guarantor of the Constitution, but supervise its enforcement only in case the country has a society with a very high level of legal consciousness and a highly professional parliament.
“In the absence of these two circumstances, the issue of constitutional guarantees is pushed into the background and we have disagreements,” he said.
Meanwhile, Ayvazyan said in the methodology of interpretation of the Constitution it is necessary to understand that it is a conceptual document and its literal interpretations are unacceptable under any circumstances. “It must be interpreted exclusively in terms of content,” he added.