Government-backed amendments to the Armenian Criminal Code enacted last summer made “grave insults” directed at state officials and public figures an offense punishable with hefty fines or prison sentences of up to three months.
More than 50 Armenians have been charged with defamation and hundreds of others investigated on the same grounds since the amendments took effect in September. Many of those criminal cases stem from offensive comments on Pashinian made on social media or in public speeches.
Pashinian’s political allies dismissed until recently calls for a repeal of the legislation voiced by local and Western human rights groups such as Freedom House and Amnesty International. Justice Minister Karen Andreasian unexpectedly announced last month that the punitive measure has been excluded from a new Criminal Code that came into force on July 1.
The development meant that all criminal cases opened under the scrapped amendments will have to be closed. This has clearly not been the case so far.
Artak Avetian, an Armenian software engineer based in Germany, arrived in Armenia on vacation with his wife and two children last month. He was later barred from flying back to Munich after discovering at Yerevan’s Zvartnots airport that he was charged in March with offending Pashinian.
Avetian was detained at the airport before spending a night at a police station in Yerevan. He was informed there that the accusation leveled against him stems from a Facebook post in which he lambasted Pashinian for the fact that the post of Armenia’s top general remains vacant following an apparent purge of the army top brass. Avetian said a law-enforcement officer told him that only a prosecutor overseeing the inquiry into the post can drop the charge.
“I don’t know what the prosecutors are saying now,” the 50-year-old told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service over the weekend. “I don’t even know when the investigator appealed to them.”
Avetian’s lawyer, Ruben Melikian, said he knows of several other persons who are also continuing to face such criminal charges.
The Office of the Prosecutor-General could not be reached for comment on the matter.
Artur Sakunts, a veteran human rights activist, denounced as illegal the authorities’ failure to close all such cases. “We are dealing with failure to comply with a legal requirement,” he said.
Sakunts reiterated his view that the Pashinian administration’s 2021 decision to criminalize insults was politically motivated and unjustified.
Justice Minister Andreasian defended the decision on June 11, claiming that it helped to “rein in the shameful and unacceptable behavior of certain groups and individuals.”
Armenian opposition leaders maintain that it was aimed at silencing vocal critics of the current government. They say that Pashinian himself has relied heavily on slander and “hate speech” before and after coming to power in 2018.
All forms of slander and defamation had already been decriminalized in Armenia in 2010.
