Davtian, who now teaches law at Yerevan State University (YSU), is one of more than 50 university professors who have signed a petition backing the protest movement led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian. He attended on Friday Galstanian’s fresh meeting with YSU students boycotting classes in a show of support for the opposition-backed movement.
“I too think that Armenia’s current prime minister must go because I think that no solution is offered [by him] in this dire and complicated situation,” Davtian told reporters outside the main university building.
Davtian condemned Pashinian’s decision to transfer several border areas to Azerbaijan which sparked the protests late last month. He dismissed the premier’s claim that failure to make the territorial concessions would provoke Azerbaijani military aggression against Armenia.
“This is not a good or bad solution, this is an absence of it,” he said. “They have said that ‘if we don’t carry out a process of border delimitation we will get a war, but even if we carry it out we don’t know whether or not there will be a war.’”
“The prime minister’s job is to make sure that we win wars. What kind of scaremongering is this?” added the 45-year-old.
Davtian was appointed as prosecutor-general in 2016 by Armenia’s parliament dominated by then President Serzh Sarkisian’s loyalists. He retained his post after Sarkisian resigned in 2018 amid mass protests led by Pashinian.
In the following years, Armenian opposition leaders regularly accused Davtian of executing Pashinian’s orders to prosecute and jail government critics. He always denied the accusations.
Pashinian and his political allies, who control the current parliament, decided in 2022 not to appoint Davtian for a second six-year term. He was replaced by Anna Vardapetian, a former aide to Pashinian.