The Armenian National Movement was the driving force in the protests against falsifications of the presidential election of 2008, rallying up to 300.000 protesters in the centre of Yerevan. According to the numbers published by the Armenian government, Armenia’s first elected President after independence, Levon Ter-Petrossian had 21.5% of the vote while the candidate of the governing party, Prime Minister Serzh Sargsian, won by 52%. The results of the election were contested by the opposition. OSCE‘s final report on the election, published on May 30 2008 , also raises some very serious doubts.

The peaceful protests against the electoral falsifications were followed by clashes with the police in which 10 people died. Also, many protesters were arrested and about 150 people went to jail. The chairman of ANM, Ararat Zurabian and several members of the ANM board such as the former foreign minister and former party chairman, Alexander Azourmanyan, have been in prison for more than a year after the demonstrations of March 2008. Most of them have been released under pressure from the EU, but some 14 people are still in jail, most of them members of ANM.

ELDR Vice President Markus Löning (FDP, Germany): “it is not acceptable that a member state of the Council of Europe and the Eastern Partnership and a major recipient of aid from European tax payers’ money is keeping people in prison for political reasons.” Löning therefore calls upon the ELDR, its member parties, the ALDE groups in the Council of Europe and the European Parliament and liberal governments to raise the issue of the remaining political prisoners and put more pressure on the Armenian government to release them.