Anna Kostanyan: Having introduced Hayakve into the National Assembly, we will try to exert pressure on the Civil Contract to avoid signing a final surrender

On October 11, the Free Artsakh-Hayakve initiative submitted a bill to the National Assembly, proposing criminal penalties for recognizing Artsakh as part of Azerbaijan and denying the Armenian Genocide.

Back in June, Hayakve came up with this legislative initiative and appealed to the Central Election Commission to collect signatures to submit the project to the parliament.

The CEC gave time from June 21 to August 19 to organize the collection of signatures; Hayakve managed to collect required 50,000 votes ahead of the deadline to submit the project to the parliament and put it to a vote.

On September 19, a day after Azerbaijan’s attack on Artsakh, the republic’s authorities were forced to accept the Russian peacekeepers’ proposal for a ceasefire and sit down at the negotiating table with Baku.

According to this agreement, the Artsakh Defense Forces were liquidated, the republic was disarmed, and a week later, on September 28, the President of Artsakh signed a decree on the termination of the existence of the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic from January 1, 2024.

Alpha News spoke with Anna Kostanyan, a member of the Free Artsakh-Hayakve initiative group, to understand whether the submission of the Hayakve bill to parliament was not a belated process given the current conditions.

According to Kostanyan, the bill is relevant until there is a final document signed by the head of Armenia.