Grigorian stepped down on January 23 after less than a year in office. She said she is planning to move on to another job.
Under the Armenian constitution, Grigorian has to be replaced by the Armenian parliament within three months from her resignation. Civil Contract, which controls the current National Assembly, has given no indication yet who could replace her.
Vigen Khachatrian, a senior member of the party’s parliamentary group, said on Thursday that he and his colleagues were encouraged by their parliamentary leader to propose candidates for the vacant post. They have shown little interest in doing that,” he said.
“There are probably two reasons,” Khachatrian told reporters. “Either there is no [suitable] candidate or there are too many of them.”
Taguhi Tovmasian, an opposition deputy chairing the Armenian parliament’s standing committee on human rights, criticized the delay.
“This is indicative of how the state treats the protection of human rights,” charged Tovmasian. “If they found that important, they would not display such a disdainful attitude towards this [state] institution.”
“We are now witnessing processes to which the ombudsperson’s reaction is extremely important. And yet the office of the ombudsperson is now headless,” she said, singling out Azerbaijan’s continuing blockade of Nagorno-Karabakh’s land link with Armenia and its humanitarian consequences for Karabakh’s population.
The two opposition groups represented in the National Assembly have not nominated any candidates either. Tovmasian said they realize that the parliament’s pro-government majority would almost certainly reject their choice of the human rights defender. In these circumstances, she said, the opposition also has trouble convincing potential candidates to run for the post.
The opposition lawmakers voted against Grigorian when the parliament elected her in January 2022. They described her as a government loyalist who will not take serious action against human rights violations in the country.
Unlike her outspoken predecessor Arman Tatoyan, Grigorian rarely criticized the government and law-enforcement bodies during her tenure.