Kocharian, his former chief of staff Armen Gevorgian and two retired army generals are prosecuted again in connection with a 2008 post-election violence in Yerevan. They were cleared of “overthrow of the constitutional order” in April 2021 after Armenia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the accusation, rejected by them as politically motivated, is unconstitutional.
Prosecutors appealed against the acquittal, saying that they must be allowed to bring a different accusation also related to the events of March 2008, which left eight protesters and two police personnel dead. The Court of Cassation gave the green light for the new trial a month ago.
“For more than one and a half years, I was imprisoned illegally, under a non-existent article [of the Criminal Code,] and neither the prosecutors nor any other state body has apologized to me,” the ex-president told journalists after attending the second court hearing in the high-profile case.
“On the contrary, through some chicanery, they are bringing the case back to court for certain purposes,” he said. “What is happening is legal hooliganism.”
It remained unclear which concrete articles of the Criminal Code Kocharian, Gevorgian, former Defense Minister Seyran Ohanian and former army chief of staff Yury Khachaturov are now standing trial. The prosecutors have still not formally filed a new accusation. Nevertheless, the presiding judge and a trial prosecutor insisted that all four men are “defendants.”
“I am not an accused, I have come here to show good will,” Kocharian told them at the start of the hearing.
“And since I do not have the status of an accused, we will sit somewhere else,” he added, leaving the dock together with his lawyers.
After being acquitted of the coup charge in 2022, Kocharian and Gevorgian continued to stand trial on a separate corruption charge. That trial ended without a verdict last December, with the ex-president invoking the statute of limitations that expired in May 2023.
Anna Danibekian, the judge who presided over it, was controversially removed from the bench in July. Armenia’s government and judicial oversight body, which is headed by a political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian, accused Danibekian of letting Kocharian artificially drag out the court hearings.
Pashinian was the main speaker at the 2008 protests marred by the deadly violence. He spent nearly two years in prison for his role in what the former Armenian authorities described as a plot to violently overthrow them.