Category: News

In a statement released on Friday, Veronika Zonabend also said that Azerbaijan’s human rights ombudswoman has ignored her repeated appeals to help an international delegation of women visit the prisoners and hand them letters, parcels and other essential items from their families.

“Unfortunately, we have not yet received a reply,” she said. “In the meantime, reports appeared in Azerbaijani media suggesting that I could be arrested if I came to the country.”

“We are also concerned that since August 25, Ruben’s local lawyer has been denied access to him. We hope this issue will be resolved,” added Zonabend.

Vardanyan urged the Azerbaijani official, Sabina Aliyeva, in September to visit the prisoners and address what he called “violations of their rights” guaranteed by Azerbaijani law. In an audio statement communicated to his family by phone, he said that they are denied adequate medical care and are unable to make weekly phone calls to their families. Neither Aliyeva nor her office has publicly reacted to the appeal so far.

Eight of the prisoners, including Vardanyan, are former leaders of Nagorno-Karabakh who were captured right after the September 2023 Azerbaijani offensive that restored Baku’s full control over Karabakh and forced the region’s Armenian population to flee to Armenia. They received lengthy prison sentences in February at the end of what Armenian lawyers and human rights activists see as sham trials. They all deny a long list of war crimes charges levelled against them.

Prospects for the prisoners’ release have remained uncertain even after the initialing of an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty in Washington in August 2025. Neither the treaty nor a separate declaration signed by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian at the White House commits Baku to freeing them.

Pashinian’s government is regularly accused by its domestic critics of doing little to secure the prisoners’ release. It denies the accusations. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan said last month that Yerevan hopes to have them eventually freed through “our dialogue with Azerbaijan.”

Zonabend complained in her statement that the Armenian Foreign Ministry has ignored he requests of “diplomatic assistance” for her delegation’s visit to the Azerbaijani prison where the Armenian captives are held.

“Since [human rights lawyer] Siranush Sahakian and I met at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on 17 August, a responsible official has still not been named, and our written request has so far gone unanswered,” she said.

Karapetian denounced them as a “judicial disgrace” as he briefly spoke to reporters while standing trial on separate coups charges brought right after his first arrest in June 2025. It followed his condemnation of Prime Nikol Pashinian’s efforts to depose Catholicos Garegin II, the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

Karapetian as well as 35 other individuals were charged on Wednesday with fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. Armenia’s Investigative Committee claims that Karapetian led a “criminal group” that misappropriated, mainly through dividend payments, over 23 billion drams ($64 million) from Armenia’s national electric utility owned by his Tashir Kapital firm.

It says the Electric Networks of Armenia (ENA) operator lost 64 billion drams as a result. The tycoon’s aides and political allies have laughed off the accusations, saying that he could not have stolen from himself.

Tashir claims to have invested at least $700 million in ENA and sharply cut its losses since buying the utility from Russia’s RAO UES energy giant in 2015. Tashir has also kept electricity prices in Armenia largely unchanged.

Karapetian was taken into custody one day before he was scheduled to chair a meeting with leaders of other opposition groups aimed at discussing ways of thwarting Pashinian’s plans to enact a new Armenian constitution demanded by Azerbaijan. His Strong Armenia alliance says that this was the main reason for his arrest. Pashinian denied any political motives behind it on Thursday.

Senior representatives of Strong Armenia and over a dozen other opposition parties and blocs met in Karapetian’s absence on Wednesday. In an ensuing joint statement, they pledged to jointly fight against the constitution they believe is being imposed on Armenia by Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev and to prevent other “unilateral concessions” to Baku.

The ruling Civil Contract party lacks a two-thirds majority in the Armenian parliament required for holding a mandatory referendum on the draft constitution. Pashinian repeated on Monday his threats to generate “public pressure” on Strong Armenia and another opposition bloc represented in the parliament, Hayastan, if they continue to block the vote. He earlier threatened to organize demonstrations outside the parliament for that purpose.

“There will be public pressure, but it will be in the opposite direction,” Tigran Abrahamian, a Strong Armenia lawmaker, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday. “We will not allow the adoption of Aliyev’s constitution in Armenia.”

Anna Grigorian, Hayastan’s parliamentary leader, made the same point. She expressed confidence that Pashinian will not pull large crowds to pressure the opposition.

“It would be very hard for him to say, ‘Dear people, let’s take to the streets and convince the opposition to adopt Aliyev’s constitution,’” she said.

Shatirian implied that Vladimir Vartanian was elected the court’s chairman as a result of government pressure exerted on other justices. Vartanian, who was until recently affiliated with Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s Civil Contract party, denied such pressure.

The position became vacant last month after its previous holder, Arman Dilanian, completed his six-year term in office. The court’s nine judges have since voted for four times to pick his replacement, with Shatirian and Vartanian being the only candidates. The latter eventually received five votes needed for succeeding Dilanian.

Shatirian was quick to announce that he is resigning as deputy chairman but will continue to serve as a judge.

“About six and a half years later, we have come full circle,” he said. “Was this the ultimate goal of the constitutional amendments that happened in June 2020? I personally don’t want to believe this, but the current realities force us to acknowledge it.”

The amendments cited by Shatirian mandated the gradual resignation of seven Constitutional Court justices who were locked in a standoff with Pashinian’s political team. Pashinian accused them of maintaining close ties to Armenia’s former government and impeding his “judicial reforms.”

Opposition leaders and other critics countered that Pashinian is only keen to purge the judiciary in order to cement grip on power. They also insisted that the ruling party enacted the amendments in an unconstitutional manner.

Three of the justices at odds with Pashinian had to step down with immediate effect. Shatirian was handpicked by the Armenian government to replace one of them. The government got rid of the four other judges in the following years.

Vartanian, 47, served as the chairman of the Armenian parliament committee on legal affairs before fellow pro-government lawmakers elected him as a Constitutional Court judge in March this year. He claimed on Friday that he is no longer guided by partisan or political interests.

Hrayr Tovmasian, a former Constitutional Court chairman deposed by Pashinian’s government in 2020 through the constitutional amendments, headed the same parliament committee during former President Serzh Sarkisian’s rule. Tovmasian was also affiliated with Sarkisian’s Republican Party until being appointed to the court in 2018.

In an article published on Thursday, Ali Akbar Velayati said Pashinian’s pro-Western foreign policy contradicts “the interests of the Armenian people” and opens “a new chapter of hostility and tension in the South Caucasus.” He singled out a U.S.-Armenian agreement on the Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity (TRIPP) that would run along Armenia’s border with Iran.

Velayati said that the TRIPP is tantamount to an extraterritorial “Zangezur corridor” demanded by Baku and opposed by Tehran. He said he repeatedly made clear to senior Armenian diplomats that the project’s implementation remains a “red line” for the Islamic Republic drawn by the late Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“I clearly told the Armenian ambassador [to Iran] the final word that if [U.S. President Donald] Trump and his allies want to cross this Iranian red line, we will break their legs,” he wrote in the Iranian newspaper Ettelaat.

Velayati’s last reported meeting with Ambassador Grigor Hakobian took place in December 2025 more than two months before the start of the U.S.-Israeli military campaign against Iran. The Iranian official also received Armenia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Vahan Kostanian in Tehran earlier in 2025. Contacted by RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Friday, Kostanian did not immediately comment on his latest warnings to Yerevan.

The warnings contrast with recent statements by Iranian government officials, notably Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi. Visiting Yerevan on October 16, Araghchi said the Iranians “trust our Armenian brothers” on the TRIPP and believe “they are doing nothing that would compromise Iran’s security.”

The issue was high on the agenda of Armenian Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan’s October 5 talks in Tehran with Araghchi as well as Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. Mirzoyan said afterwards that Tehran is “satisfied” with Yerevan’s assurances that the transit arrangement will not lead to any U.S. military presence along the Armenian-Iranian border.

Velayati also criticized the Armenian parliament for ratifying last week the U.S.-Armenian framework agreement on practical modalities of the TRIPP. The agreement calls for the creation of a joint venture that will build and manage for at least 49 years a railway, a road, energy supply lines and other infrastructure connecting Azerbaijan to its Nakhichevan exclave and Turkey. The U.S. government will own 74 percent of the TRIPP Development Company (TDC).