The Yerevan daily Aravot reported late last week a number of such orders and reader comments that prompted them. It said the Office of the Prosecutor-General has told another law-enforcement agency, the Investigative Committee, to consider charging those individuals with publicly threatening Pashinian or calling for violence against him.
The law-enforcement authorities did not deny the report. As of Monday afternoon, they did not respond to RFE/RL’s written questions about how many people, if any, are prosecuted over their reactions to Pashinian’s social media posts or news stories about him.
According to Aravot, one of the investigated persons is Diana Khechoyan, an Armenian-born woman apparently living in the United States.
“You compare yourself too much to Christ, let's crucify you as a nation, maybe that's how we'll get rid of you,” she commented recently below a Pashinian post.
Another social media user reportedly risking prosecution wished Pashinian to “die with your sick laws.”
Vartan Harutiunian, a human rights activist and former dissident who had been jailed in Soviet times, expressed serious concern over the prosecutors’ reported monitoring of such social media content. He drew parallels with Soviet authorities treatment of dissent.
“The Soviet Union is a forgotten thing of the past, but it turns out that Soviet thinking and upbringing continue to live among us, among our people, among our leaders,” Harutiunian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “As if they didn’t watch citizens enough under [former Presidents] Robert Kocharian and Serzh Sarkisian, they are now doing the same under Nikol Pashinian.”
In recent weeks, at least three well-known critics of Armenia’s government have been arrested on charges of insulting other senior state officials. They include lawyer Aleksandr Kochubayev.
Masked officers of the National Security Service (NSS) pulled Kochubayev out of his car, threw him onto the ground and then drove him away on October 16 the day after he denounced as “sons of a b*tch” law-enforcement and judicial officials involved the arrest of yet another Armenian bishop. Kochubayev was released from custody a few days later due to the urgent hospitalization of his wife.
On November 13, two pro-opposition podcasters, Naren Samsonian and Vazgen Saghatelian, were arrested on charges of making offensive and menacing statements about parliament speaker Alen Simonian. Another vocal Pashinian critic, Edgar Ghazarian, is standing trial for spreading “defamatory information” about Armenian courts. He is not held in detention.
No political allies or other supporters of Pashinian are known to have been prosecuted for offending or voicing threats against opposition politicians.
