A Yerevan court freed the 70-year-old Gharib Babayan hours after the arrest amid street protests and a wave of condemnation from Armenian opposition leaders and activists, prominent public figures and human rights campaigners.
The short video posted late last week on the Facebook page of a non-governmental organization led by Babayan showed the foreigners signing an Azerbaijani song about Karabakh in apparent celebration of Azerbaijan’s recapture of the region in 2023. Babayan commented angrily on the footage shared by many other Facebook users and media outlets, branding Armenia’s leaders as “corrupt scumbags.”
“Can you imagine what would happen to a group of similar young Armenians if they sang a song, even a non-patriotic one, in Armenian in Baku?” he wrote. “The corrupt scumbags in power have degraded our country in such a way that Azeris behave so brazenly and impudently in the center of Yerevan.”
Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) said on Saturday that the men shown in the video are Iranian nationals (presumably of Azerbaijani descent) who visited the country for the New Year holidays. The NSS said it petitioned another law-enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee, to launch criminal proceedings against Babayan.
The committee was quick to detain the Karabakh Armenian man and accuse him of “distorting the essence” of the scandalous video in order to “incite hatred, intolerance and hostility towards the authorities and police officers of Armenia.” It went on to ask the court of first instance for permission to hold him in detention pending investigation.
Critics of the Armenian government reacted furiously to the development, saying that Babayan did not break any laws and that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian ordered the criminal proceedings to discourage protests against more Armenian concessions to Azerbaijan planned by him. Hundreds of them rallied against the court building in Yerevan on Saturday night during court hearings on Babayan’s pre-trial arrest.
In a ruling announced after midnight, the court refused to sanction the arrest while placing Babayan under “administrative surveillance” which seriously restricts his freedom of expression. His lawyer strongly denied the “hate speech” charges.
Zaruhi Hovannisian, a veteran human rights activist, also decried the accusations, said that the authorities want to “silence” Babayan and set a dangerous precedent for stifling dissent in the country. She insisted on Monday that the Karabakh refugee’s Facebook comment “fully fits into the freedom of speech.”
Vahagn Aleksanian, a deputy chairman of the ruling Civil Contract party, denied any political motives behind the criminal case.
“It’s a legal process,” Aleksanian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Let lawyers and courts deal with that.”