HAYK GRIGORYAN

The Academic Member of the Supreme Judicial Council of

the Republic of Armenia,

Doctor of Law

DOI: https://doi.org/10.59546/18290744-2024.4-6-89

Annotation.

The article examines the problems of the lack of adequate implementing legislation in the Republic of Armenia, as well as the incompatibility of the norms of national legislation and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. The article provides a legal analysis of the norms of substantive and procedural law in relation to a number of key legal institutions and substantiates the need for relevant lawmaking activities, which are essentially inevitable after the ratification and entry into force of the Rome Statute of the ICC. In order to eliminate the analyzed legal gaps, it is proposed to make appropriate amendments to the Criminal and Criminal Procedure Codes, as well as to a number of other laws. It is proposed to eliminate the legal gap in cooperation between national criminal justice bodies and the ICC by creating a special governmental institute for cooperation with the ICC, appointing national coordinators, ratifying the Agreement on Privileges and Immunities of the ICC and adopting the Law on Cooperation with the ICC. It is proposed to include in the Criminal Procedure Code of the Republic of Armenia a separate chapter on the norms and procedures for organizing investigations and collecting evidence. In order to overcome the high level of blanketness of war crimes, as well as taking into account the existing international legal obligations of the Republic of Armenia, it is proposed to split the same-name Chapter 22 of Section VIII of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia “Crimes against the Peace and Security of Mankind” and supplement Section VIII with separate chapters - “Crimes against Peace” (Chapter 22 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia), “Crimes against the Security of Mankind” (Chapter 23 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia), “War Crimes” (Chapter 24 of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia), thereby incorporating Art. 6 of the Rome Statute of the ICC “Genocide”, Art. 7 “Crimes against Humanity” and Art. 8 “War Crimes” into Section VIII of the Criminal Code of the Republic of Armenia. Such an approach will ensure the unification of all crimes against international humanitarian law, where only the chapter “War Crimes” will include about 50 different types of war crimes, taking into account the list of crimes also provided for by customary international law.

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