Armenia's constitutional reform council aims to have draft constitution before next elections

Justice Minister Srbuhi Galian said on Tuesday that a government panel headed by her will draft a new constitution for Armenia before the country’s next general elections expected in June 2026. Galian is the current head of the Constitutional Reform Council that was formed by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian in 2022 with the initial aim of proposing amendments to the current Armenian constitution. Pashinian changed the ad hoc body’s mandate last May, saying that it must draft a “new constitution” from scratch before January 2027. The move came as the Azerbaijani leaders continued to make the signing of a peace treaty with Armenia conditional on a change of its constitution which they say contains territorial claims to Azerbaijan. Baku specifically wants Yerevan to remove a constitutional preamble that mentions Armenia’s 1990 declaration of independence, which in turn cites a 1989 unification act adopted by the legislative bodies of Soviet Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh Autonomous Oblast. The only legal way to do that is to enact an entirely new constitution through a referendum.
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