Former Emergency Situations Minister Andranik Piloyan has applied to the Constitutional Court, challenging the constitutionality of Article 383, Part 3 of the Criminal Procedure Code.
In his application, Piloyan asked the court to declare Article 383, Part 3 of Armenia’s Criminal Procedure Code contrary to Article 61 of the Constitution and invalid insofar as the provision directly allows the Court of Cassation, when deciding not to admit a cassation appeal for consideration, to provide no reasoning at all for its conclusion that the contested judicial act raises no issue concerning the development of law, Pastinfo reports.
Describing the procedural history of the criminal case against him, the applicant noted that when a cassation appeal is filed on the ground that the contested judicial act raises an issue concerning the development of law, the Court of Cassation is not required, in its decision refusing to admit the appeal for consideration, to substantiate the absence of that condition. In particular, according to the applicant, the contested provision — Article 383, Part 3 of Armenia’s Criminal Procedure Code — directly allows the Court of Cassation to omit entirely any reasoning for its conclusion that no issue concerning the development of law exists in relation to the contested judicial act.
The applicant argued that such regulation is incompatible with the substance of the right to effective judicial protection guaranteed by Article 61 of the Constitution. He maintained that after the cassation appeal filed by his defense lawyer against the February 4, 2026 decision of the Anti-Corruption Court of Appeal in criminal case No. HKD/0121/01/22 was denied admission, through the application of Article 383, Part 3 of Armenia’s Criminal Procedure Code, he was deprived, at the final judicial instance, of the opportunity to obtain precedent-setting answers from the Court of Cassation on issues of essential importance to his case and to have those answers applied to it.
The applicant pointed out that this occurred even though the presiding judge of the panel reviewing the December 10, 2024 judgment of the Anti-Corruption Court in criminal case No. HKD/0121/01/22 had agreed with the relevant ground and reasoning of the appeal filed against that judgment by Andranik Manukyan, defense lawyer for defendant Andranik Piloyan. The judge issued a dissenting opinion stating that the results of the operational-search measure known as «internal surveillance», conducted in relation to Andranik Piloyan, acquired the status of evidence while Armenia’s Criminal Procedure Code, which entered into force on July 1, 2022, was in effect, by virtue of the investigator’s July 22, 2022 decision recognizing those results as an extraprocedural document. Consequently, according to the dissenting opinion, video recordings, audiovisual recordings, audio recordings and other objective documents obtained through the operational-search measure cited in the investigator’s decision could not have been used in those criminal proceedings.
The Constitutional Court refused to consider the case on the grounds that the issue raised in the application did not fall within the Constitutional Court’s jurisdiction.
