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“My colleagues and I have repeatedly talked about some extremely incomprehensible provisions of Article 300.1 of Armenia’s Criminal Code, such as ‘factual elimination of a norm’, ‘termination of the validity of a norm in the legal system’, to name a few,” second Armenian President Robert Kocharyan’s lawyer Aram Vardevanyan told an open-air news conference on Friday.

He stressed that the Venice Commission, familiarizing itself with those provisions of Article 300.1 of the Criminal Code, concluded that they are so vague that perhaps there is even a problem of mistranslation that they are worded in such a way and did not address them at all in its opinion delivered on Thursday.

"In other words, we are dealing with such a great uncertainty," Vardevanyan said.

Robert Kocharyan was charged last year under Article 300.1 of the Armenian Criminal Code dealing with violent seizure of power.

“The overthrow of the constitutional order – the factual elimination of any norm stipulated in Articles 1 to 5 of the Constitution or Article 6.1 which is expressed in termination of the validity of the norm in the legal system – shall be punishable by ten to fifteen years of imprisonment,” Article 300.1 reads.

In July 2019, the Armenian Constitutional Court decided to suspend the proceedings against the former president and requested the Venice Commission and ECHR to prepare an advisory opinion on the compliance of the article with the Constitution.