CC: The pattern behind Armenia’s opposition prosecutions – Hrair Balian

By Hrair Balian

Civilnet

An analysis of arrests, detentions, use of force, and prosecutions of political, civic, and religious figures, May 2025–July 2026

Since May 2025, Armenia has witnessed a sustained wave of arrests, prosecutions, immunity revocations, travel bans, and asset seizures targeting senior clergy of the Apostolic Church, opposition leaders, business figures, journalists, and election candidates.

Taken case by case, the government has offered a legal rationale for nearly every case — tax evasion, money laundering, vote-buying, preparation of terrorism, high treason and more. Taken together, however, the cases display recurring structural features that international human rights bodies have long identified as hallmarks of politically motivated persecution rather than ordinary law enforcement.

Armenia is bound by its own Constitution in the first place, also by international obligations including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), both of which set clear limits on state power in exactly the areas these cases touch. Several of the patterns below appear to test, or cross, those limits. Armenia ratified the ICCPR in 1993 and the ECHR in 2002.

Timing that tracks political calendars, not evidence

A defining feature of the past year is how closely arrests and restrictions cluster around political events rather than the moment evidence emerges. Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, leader of the “Sacred Struggle” movement since 2024 demanding Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation, was arrested on 25 June 2025, in a coordinated raid on more than a dozen associates and opposition figures. Samvel Karapetyan, owner of the Tashir Group, was detained on 18 June 2025, hours after publicly voicing support for the Armenian Apostolic Church amid its standoff with the government. At a time of escalating tensions between the government and the Church, Archbishop Mikayel Ajapahyan was arrested over public statements he had made in the past—statements that prosecutors had previously found did not constitute a criminal offense.

The Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF or Dashnaktsutyun) raids of 9–10 July 2025 came directly on the heels of PM Pashinyan’s return from Turkey and Armenia–Azerbaijan corridor talks. Andranik Tevanyan was searched and charged with treason days after PM Pashinyan personally announced on the campaign trail that a case would be filed against him. The heaviest concentration of arrests — Tevanyan, dozens of Strong Armenia supporters — fell in the final weeks before the 7 June 2026 election, and a fresh wave arrests and revocations of immunity followed within days of the results, hitting Robert Kocharyan, Gagik Tsarukyan, Avetik Chalabyan, and multiple Strong Armenia and Armenia Alliance figures once seats and immunities were at stake.

This clustering matters legally. Article 25 of the ICCPR protects the right to take part in public affairs and to stand for office without unreasonable restriction, and international monitors have flagged criminal process timed to disable candidates or silence movements at politically decisive moments as evidence of improper purpose rather than routine enforcement.

Prolonged pretrial detention without individualized justification

Article 9(3) of the ICCPR and Article 5(3) of the ECHR require that pretrial detention be the exception, justified by case-specific, “relevant and sufficient” reasons rather than the seriousness of the charge alone. Galstanyan spent 344 days in pretrial detention before being moved to house arrest in June 2026, with the underlying terrorism and coup charges still intact. Karapetyan was held for more than six months, including a documented sequence in which he was returned to a pretrial detention facility via hospital just seventeen days after being granted house arrest, before being restored to house arrest two days later. Tsarukyan and several Strong Armenia candidates were placed in two-month pretrial detention blocks that map closely onto the election and post-election calendar. Detention whose length and manner tracks political milestones rather than investigative need is precisely what the ICCPR and ECHR provisions are designed to prevent.

The Armenian law enforcement authorities’ use of brute force during the 69-year-old Tsarukyan’s arrest pinning him to the ground and 12-hour raid on his mansion raises additional concerns. The spectacle caught on camera seemed meant to humiliate Tsarukyan. Armenia’s human rights ombudsperson concluded that the physical force used was disproportionate. Article 10 of the ICCPR requires that all persons “deprived of their liberty should be treated with humanity and with respect for the inherent dignity of the human person”.

Criminalizing speech through broad, vaguely defined offenses

Some of the prosecutions rest on statutes applied to speech — “public calls for usurping state power,” “preparation to seize power,” “hooliganism using information technology”. Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was convicted in September 2025 and sentenced to two years in prison based on statements he made in media interviews; his lawyer argued he had done nothing more than express an opinion, and his defense has taken the case to the European Court of Human Rights. Karapetyan’s core charge similarly stems from a single televised remark of support for the Church. The “Imnemnimi” podcast co-hosts, Vazgen Saghatelyan and Narek Samsonyan, were charged with hooliganism after on-air remarks responding to an insult from the National Assembly speaker; Samsonyan was held about five months and undertook a 15-day hunger strike before receiving medical care, while Saghatelyan spent nearly five months in detention before being released under supervision that bars him from public speaking. The Council of Europe’s Platform for the Protection of Journalism issued a Level 1 alert over their detention, and Armenia was added to the Council of Europe’s list of states holding journalists or media actors in custody for the first time.

Article 19 of the ICCPR and Article 10 of the ECHR protect political speech as the category of _expression_ receiving the highest level of protection. Broad “usurpation of power” or “hooliganism” statutes, applied to interviews and broadcast commentary rather than to any incitement to imminent violence, raise the classic problem the UN Human Rights Committee has identified: vague statutes criminalizing criticism of government chill legitimate political speech well beyond their stated target. A custodial response, including a post-release ban on public speaking, is a serious restriction on core _expression_ rights requiring a correspondingly serious justification.

Selective, opposition-concentrated enforcement

Every major figure named in this article is a declared government critic, opposition leader, or an institution seen as a check on PM Pashinyan’s authority: the Catholicos and senior clergy, Karapetyan (a declared prime ministerial candidate), the ARF leadership, Kocharyan and Tsarukyan (heads of the two largest opposition blocs), and civic figures like Chalabyan, a former McKinsey senior partner and coordinator of the HayaQve citizen initiative arrested in June 2026 over alleged efforts to encourage diaspora voting for the opposition. Vote-buying allegations have concentrated heavily on Strong Armenia, with reporting describing “dozens, and possibly hundreds” of its members and supporters facing such accusations, and 14 affiliates arrested in a single sweep in April 2026.

International human rights law does not forbid prosecuting politicians or their supporters for genuine crimes. But the non-discrimination guarantees of Article 26 ICCPR require that enforcement not be selectively concentrated against one side of the political spectrum absent a neutral explanation. A pattern in which essentially every significant opposition figure, across unrelated parties, faces prosecution within the same fourteen-month window is itself evidence relevant to a discriminatory enforcement claim, even where individual charges might be prima facia valid.

Immunity stripped on a schedule that outruns due process

Parliamentary immunity exists to protect the legislature’s independence from executive pressure, not to shield individuals from accountability indefinitely — but the sequence here is telling. Kocharyan was blocked from leaving Armenia on 14 June 2026, and his immunity was revoked by the Central Election Commission three days later, on 17 June, over a 2004 government transaction that his lawyer says predates any involvement by Kocharyan or his family and that he argues is time-barred. Davit Ghazinyan, a Strong Armenia candidate, was stripped of immunity and jailed within days of the same CEC session.

Where immunity-stripping is fast-tracked against newly elected opposition legislators specifically, tied to decades-old conduct with no apparent new evidence, it undermines the independence Article 25 ICCPR protections for political participation are meant to secure.

Property and economic coercion alongside criminal process

The government’s move to nationalize Karapetyan’s Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) — Armenia’s sole electricity distributor — ran in parallel with his criminal case. An emergency arbitrator at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce ordered the suspension of the nationalization process on 24 July 2025, barring the government from altering ENA’s management or revoking its license; Armenian authorities did not comply, and the country’s international legal affairs representative was dismissed after stating publicly that the ruling was binding.

Article 1 of Protocol 1 to the ECHR protects property from arbitrary deprivation, and an international arbitral body’s willingness to grant emergency relief suggests the property action itself may not withstand ordinary legal scrutiny.

What the government says, and what remains contested

The government frames several of the most serious cases — Karapetyan, Tevanyan, Chalabyan — as responses to genuine foreign (Russian) interference in Armenian politics rather than ordinary political prosecution and has pointed to reports of Russian disinformation efforts around the election. That context is not dismissed by all monitors uniformly: the Union of Informed Citizens, led by Daniel Ioannisyan, has said it referred material underlying the Chalabyan case to prosecutors. Genuine national-security prosecutions are not inherently unlawful, and none of the above amounts to a finding that any individual defendant is innocent or that no underlying conduct occurred. In accordance with the Criminal Procedure Code of Armenia and internation human rights law, a person charged with a criminal offence is presumed innocent until proven guilty by a final court verdict.

What the pattern shows is that Armenia’s institutions have, across a large number of cases spanning multiple unrelated actors, repeatedly generated the specific structural markers — political timing, extended detention without case-specific justification, speech-based charges under vague statutes, opposition-concentrated enforcement, and fast-tracked immunity removal — that international human rights law treats as warning signs of a system being used for political ends rather than impartial justice. In Armenia, contrary to human rights standards, figures opposed to the government seem to be presumed guilty until proven innocent.

Whether individual prosecutions ultimately prove sound, the cumulative pattern across fourteen months warrants continued independent monitoring, and the government bears the burden of demonstrating — case by case and in the aggregate — that the concerns highlighted in this article reflect ordinary law enforcement rather than the pattern they resemble.

Hrair Balian has served in leadership positions with the UN, the OSCE, and NGOs (Carter Center and International Crisis Group). During a 35-year career in public service, he has worked on conflict resolution, elections and human rights in the Balkans, Eastern Europe, Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East and Africa. Balian has also taught conflict resolution, negotiations, and mediation at the Emory University School of Law. Book author – Anatomy of Peacemaking: Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict & Missed Opportunities (Palgrave Macmillan, Feb 2026).