Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian has repeatedly alleged such a lack in his efforts to enact a new constitution demanded by Azerbaijan. Pashinian again said on Monday that the current constitution was adopted in 1995 and repeatedly amended afterwards in referendums officials results of which were not trusted by most Armenians.
Dilanian disagreed with that in an interview with RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
“We cannot, for a second, for a moment, question the constitution that we are called to defend,” he said.
Pashinian’s political opponents as well as many pundits believe that he wants to change the constitution in order to meet Azerbaijan’s key precondition for signing a peace deal with Armenia. 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 the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. The only legal way to do that is to adopt a new constitution through a referendum.
Pashinian for the first time said publicly last week that a new Armenian constitution sought by him must carry no reference to the 1990 declaration. Still, he has repeatedly cited the Armenian Constitutional Court’s September 2024 conclusion that the reference does not amount to territorial claims to Azerbaijan.
Dilanian made the same point: “The reference in the preamble is not a reference to the declaration as a whole.”
The chief justice declined to say whether or not he believes Pashinian is right to seek the removal of that reference.
“I cannot give a legal assessment of that discourse right now, at this moment, because in essence they are in some sense legal and in some sense political,” he said.