Galian heads the Constitutional Reform Council that was formed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in 2022 with the initial aim of proposing amendments to the country’s current constitution. Pashinian changed the ad hoc body’s mandate last May, saying that it must draft a “new constitution” from scratch before January 2027. The move came as the Azerbaijani leaders continued to make the signing of a peace treaty with Armenia conditional on a change of its constitution which they say contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
The council was expected to first draw up and publicize a “concept” of the new constitution. But it has not met since August. Galian has still not convened any of its meetings despite pledging to speed up the work on the constitution following her appointment as justice minister in November.
“We no longer need to develop a concept … Instead of developing a concept, we need to write a text. That is, to sit down and write a new constitution,” Galian told the ArmComedy show broadcast on YouTube over the weekend.
“I think that the text will probably be ready in ten months,” she said.
The 32-year-old minister said earlier that the drafting process has already begun. The Armenian Justice Ministry declined to clarify on Monday who exactly is involved in that process. It said only that the resulting drafts will be “periodically discussed and agreed with the Constitutional Reform Council.”
A member of the council, Daniel Ioannisian, insisted, meanwhile, that Galian’s statement contradicts the executive order signed by Pashinian in May.
“It is obvious that first of all, there should be public discussions around the concept, the concept should be prepared and adopted, there should be a public consensus around the concept, and only then should the text [of the constitution] be written based on that,” he told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Ioannisian, who runs a Western-funded nongovernmental organization, also said that the time frame mentioned by Galian is “not realistic.” The minister has repeatedly pledged to have the constitution drafted before Armenia’s next general elections due in June 2026.
The Armenian opposition maintains that the purpose of the government efforts to change the constitution is to satisfy yet another Azerbaijani demand. While denying this, Pashinian stated in February that the new constitution sought by him “may have a regional significance as well.” Galian similarly said in March that it must not “jeopardize the peace treaty.”
Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev again made clear last week that he will not sign the peace deal with Yerevan without a constitutional change acceptable to him. Baku specifically wants Yerevan to remove a constitutional preamble that mentions Armenia’s 1990 declaration of independence, which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh. The only legal way to do that is to enact an entirely new constitution through a referendum.
