By Victoria Melkonyan
A new package of amendments came into force this month that advocates say will completely transform the country’s legal framework for addressing domestic violence.
Amending the original 2017 law was an “intensive” process, says Zaruhi Mejlumyan, a lawyer at the Yerevan-based Women’s Support Center non-profit who regularly consulted with the amendments’ authors over the past two years.
“Almost every week, we were received at the National Assembly, or we communicated through emails,” Mejlumyan tells CivilNet. “We cooperated very closely with [MP] Zaruhi Batoyan, in particular.”
To address shortcomings in the original law, Mejlumyan and other consultants at the Women’s Support Center drew extensively on their experiences supporting people who have been subjected to domestic violence. The result, they say, is a survivor-centered legislative package.
“[We referred to] international standards, but much more often, we derived ideas from what we ourselves have seen,” Mejlumyan says.
Read more: Advocates welcome landmark overhaul of Armenia’s domestic violence law
In the new law, the minimum duration of an emergency protective order has been increased to 20 days. Previously, 20 days was the maximum possible duration of an emergency protective order.
According to Ani Jilozian, director of development at the Women’s Support Center, the narrow time frame of the protective orders had presented immense difficulties to those escaping domestic abuse situations.
“If an [emergency protective] order is being issued for five days, it means [a victim] might not have time to find safety and plan her next steps, and we saw this in our day-to-day work. So we pushed heavily for it to be at least 20 days,” Jilozian tells CivilNet. “This is just one example of how our work and the lived experience of survivors were translated into legislation.”
While advocates at the Women’s Support Center say the amendments mark significant progress for Armenia’s domestic violence legislation, they admit there remains room for improvement, especially in the terminology of the law.
To that point, representatives from the Women’s Support Center pushed lawmakers to include the concepts of power and control in the legal definition of domestic violence.
“We have had cases [where] the victim uses self-defense against the male perpetrator, typically minor physical things like scratching or biting, and then she is tried as a perpetrator of domestic violence. Without seeing domestic violence as a cycle of abuse involving power and control, we will continue to have this problem,” Jilozian says.
The final amendment package defines domestic violence more broadly, which advocates worry may lead to gaps in enforcement. Hasmik Gevorgyan, director of operations at the Women’s Support Center, told CivilNet that lawmakers argued the existing language already implied the concepts of power and control.
“Unfortunately, this was a big mistake, because the legal system does not interpret [the law] that way,” Gevorgyan says.
Pushing cultural change
The original law, passed in 2017 and put into effect in 2018, was met with widespread backlash from lawmakers and protestors who claimed the bill would interfere with “peace and harmony in families.” That kind of criticism was notably absent from this year’s legislative proceedings, a change that Women’s Support Center advocates attribute in part to their grassroots activism.
“Over time, and through leveraging media coverage of high-profile domestic violence court cases… campaigning, protesting on the streets, giving interviews, and doing all of the legwork to improve knowledge and attitudes around domestic violence, we started to see a real cultural shift,” Jilozian says.
Both Jilozian and Mejlumyan note that more and more women have been seeking support to escape domestic violence in recent years because of their increasing trust in Armenia’s new legal protections.
These rising case numbers also include women in intimate partnerships other than officially registered marriages, a category protected by the new amendments but not the original law.
“Younger and middle-aged women have started to reach out to us much more, because they are confident that their problems will be solved and that protective measures will be taken,” Mejlumyan says.
Ensuring enforcement
Despite the changes, the enforcement of these new amendments remains a significant concern.
To that end, Mejlumyan says, it is crucial to provide training and resources to police, judges, and lawyers, who are on the front line of enforcing domestic violence legislation.
She and other staff members at the Women’s Support Center have facilitated many of these quarterly trainings for police, including some in cooperation with the Council of Europe, over the last six years.
“Before, for example, if we wanted an emergency protection order from the police, that would present a big problem. Now, as a result of our cooperation, that has become a very normal phenomenon,” Mejlumyan says.
The Center’s staff told CivilNet that the process provided a model of cooperation demonstrating how different parts of society can work with the government towards policy reform.
