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The vicious practice of "manual" assignment of court cases to judges continues in Armenia even after the ombudsman's special report on the issue and his appeal to the Constitutional Court, Armenian Human Rights Defender Arman Tatoyan said in a statement late on Thursday.

The ombudsman states such a practice violates the objectivity of the distribution of cases among judges and, above all, threatens the constitutional right of every person to a fair consideration of his case by an independent and impartial court.

“There are serious concerns: do the chairmen of the Administrative Court or the Yerevan Court of General Jurisdiction, for example, illegally interfere in judges’ activities, or are the chairmen themselves subject to outside interference in the process of assigning court cases manually?" Tatoyan says, questioning the impartiality of courts where cases are assigned to judges at the discretion of their heads.

“How can we be sure that, for example, the chairman of Yerevan Court of General Jurisdiction does not intentionally assign a case to a particular judge in order for him/her to grant an arrest motion filed by the investigator?” he asks.

Tatoyan states his office continues to receive such reports concerning the presidents of the Administrative Court and the Yerevan Court of General Jurisdiction.

“There are also reports that court presidents discriminate between judges, leading to a vicious phenomenon of judges' dependence on them. Court chairs do not (often) comply with the requirement to distribute cases among judges in alphabetical order of their surnames. In other cases, the principle of random distribution of court cases is not observed,” he said.