The 34-year-old judge, Sargis Petrosian, complained at the start of the latest court hearing that the Yerevan.Today news service sympathetic to Kocharian constantly refers to him as a former member of Armenia’s ruling Civil Contract.
“Do you get any prompts every time you write headlines?” he asked Anna Gorginian, the Yerevan.Today reporter covering the trial.
Gorginian gave a defiant answer: “If you accuse me of being told to write a headline, I might have the same opinion about you, thinking that you are told how to conduct [court] sessions.”
Petrosian responded by ordering her to leave the courtroom. He went on to rebuke Kocharian and imply that the pro-opposition publication follows the ex-president’s orders.
“What are you trying to tell by constantly emphasizing [that Petrosian is] a ‘former Civil Contract member,’ ‘former Civil Contract member?’”
Kocharian’s lawyers denied any influence on the publication’s news coverage. One of them, Aram Vardevanian, also denounced the reporter’s expulsion as an unjustified restriction of press freedom.
The defense lawyers already pointed to Petrosian’s past links to Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s party at the start of the trial last November. They said that he must therefore recuse himself from the case.
The judge, who took the bench earlier in 2024, rejected the demand. He acknowledged that he used to be affiliated with the party “for several months” and ran for parliament on the Civil Contract ticket in 2018, a few months before becoming a prosecutor.
Later on Monday, Agnesa Khamoyan, a parliament deputy from the opposition Hayastan alliance led by Kocharian, posted on Facebook a short video of Pashinian introducing Petrosian during two election campaign rallies held by the ruling party in 2018.
“It is unclear whether the judge is ashamed of that past and has decided to purge himself at the expense of the journalist,” Khamoyan commented tartly. “But one thing is certain: nothing else should be expected from someone who holds hearings under an article [of the Criminal Code] recognized as unconstitutional.”
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” by another judge 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 in September. Kocharian decried the “disgraceful” decision.