Kocharyan, his lawyers not to attend today’s court hearing

Neither Robert Kocharyan nor his legal team will attend a court hearing in the ex-president’s trial on Tuesday, at 4pm.

In a statement released today, the defense lawyers claimed judge Armen Danielyan, presiding over the high-profile trial, didn’t allow them to present their positions in the previous hearing and immediately left for the deliberation room to decide on the matter in a ‘gross violation’ of the adversarial trial principle.

The Yerevan Court of Appeals is today set to rule on the prosecutors’ appeals against a lower court’s decisions to release Kocharyan from custody and to suspend his trial, forwarding the case to the Constitutional Court for review.