Analysis. Information current as of 13 November 2026.
On 7 November, Germany’s DW published a piece by Lusine Voskanyan with a question for a headline: could selective prosecution of the opposition threaten Armenia’s relations with the European Union? A few days later Armenian and diaspora outlets, among them the Mirror-Spectator, reprinted it, and it quickly became ammunition in an argument that was never going to die down in Yerevan anyway.
That argument usually boils down to two lines. One says: “this is political repression.” The other says: “this is just the law, and the critics work for Moscow.” The second line, in effect, swaps the question for a different one. Here we take the DW piece on its merits: what in it holds up against the facts, why appeals to legality and to outside threats do not settle the central question, and what risks follow from all this for the authorities and for Armenia itself.
What DW reports
The core story is simple. In early October, Artur Danielyan, leader of the Adekvad (“Adequate”) movement and party, was arrested. The occasion was a Facebook post in which he sharply criticised Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the security services. Shortly before, in an interview with the Infocom news outlet, Pashinyan had ruled out swapping an Azerbaijani serviceman, detained in Armenia after an attack on a family home in the village of Shaki, for Armenians held in Baku. According to DW, 19 people are being held there, among them former senior figures of the unrecognised Nagorno-Karabakh administration. Danielyan responded crudely, calling the prime minister an obscene name and accusing him of being unwilling to bring his compatriots home.
DW then builds out a chain. More than a dozen civil society organisations called the prosecution of Danielyan illegal, disproportionate and politically motivated. A similar case involves Artur Osipyan, a displaced person from Karabakh: after a verbal clash with Pashinyan ahead of the June elections he was charged with disturbing public order, obstructing the ruling party’s campaign, and, on top of that, inciting violence in a March social media post. Next comes the Freedom House statistic: almost 95 percent of cases under the 2020 provision on “public calls to violence” concerned threats against Pashinyan and his supporters, while potentially prohibited statements by members of the ruling party, according to the same report, did not receive comparable attention.
The last third of the article is about Brussels. Analyst Tigran Grigoryan and Berlin-based expert Stefan Meister explain the EU’s restraint through geopolitics: Armenia has become the EU’s main partner in the region, and the alternative to Pashinyan looks pro-Russian in that logic. An EU spokesperson, in a written reply, recalled that democracy and the rule of law are at the core of the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, and added that investigations should be independent and impartial.
The article also carries an important correction: on 9 November the editors fixed an error. The first version said that offences in Armenia’s criminal code had been decriminalised in 2020. In fact, Article 226.2 was added in 2020, so it was the other way around. For anyone retelling the story this matters: if you come across the old version online, its figures and conclusions rest on an inverted premise.
What can be checked independently
The basic facts of the Danielyan case are confirmed by Armenian sources. ArmInfo reported that he was detained on 7 October and charged with hooliganism committed using information technology (Article 297 of the criminal code), and the next day his lawyer Tigran Atanesyan reported a two-month remand and said that the charges had been expanded. That puts the expiry of the pre-trial measure at roughly early December, when the question of extension will be the court’s next test.
There is a telling detail that the rights groups themselves point to: the investigators have not disclosed which posts form the basis of the case. This is noted in the joint statement of 11 organisations and in the Yerevan Press Club’s analysis. It is hard, for the authorities’ opponents and for the authorities themselves alike, to judge the legality of prosecuting words without knowing what the words were.
The Osipyan case is documented too: Armenian human rights organisations, including the Vanadzor office of the Helsinki Citizens’ Assembly, called his arrest disproportionate and selective.
There is also a third case that DW does not mention. On 29 September the screenwriter and actor Vahram Sahakyan was detained. The Investigative Committee charges him with inciting hatred under Article 329 over a post dated 8 January 2025, and, by the agency’s account, an expert examination confirmed hatred in the publication only on 1 September 2026. The court then barred him from publishing on social media. Artur Papyan, chair of the Yerevan Press Club, believes both cases, Sahakyan’s and Danielyan’s, are no coincidence but a system of intimidation, and he adds a pointed qualification himself: both men are known for harsh and scandalous statements, yet in a democratic state criminal prosecution is unacceptable even for the nastiest criticism.
The 95 percent figure: what it proves and what it doesn’t
This statistic cannot be skipped, because the whole thesis of selectivity rests on it. And it does not have a single source. The Yerevan think tank RCDS (Regional Center for Democracy and Security), the same one DW draws Grigoryan from, reported earlier that in 2020–2023 about 95 percent of criminal cases over speech involved people who had targeted the prime minister or his supporters. Freedom House, in its report, repeats a close figure for Article 226.2.
What does it mean? The statistic shows the composition of cases, not the number of complaints filed. In theory, if the overwhelming majority of threats really are aimed at the prime minister (he is the most public person in the country), the skew would appear even without ill intent. But that argument has limits. During the pre-election period the same RCDS recorded online harassment of Karabakh refugees by pro-government bloggers, and, as DW reports, there were almost no criminal cases over those episodes. When some statements are taken to court and others, no less aggressive, go unanswered, the question of equality before the law arises not from a number but from comparing concrete cases.
History matters too. It was not 2020 but the summer of 2021 that brought the “grave insult” article (137.1), under which more than 800 cases had been opened by April 2022, many of them over insults directed at Pashinyan, as Azatutyun also reported. The provision was repealed in July 2022 under domestic and international pressure, as RCDS notes. Article 226.2 itself appeared in 2020 and, going by the logic of the bill, was meant as protection against violence on grounds of sex, race and other characteristics, and could well have been narrow. Practice turned out differently. Council of Europe experts, incidentally, recommended clarifying in the law what exactly counts as incitement to violence.
How this mechanism has worked in other cases
The Danielyan case is not the first. Put the episodes of the past two years side by side and they follow one pattern. We rely here on three sources: the analysis by RCDS and CivilNet, a column by the human rights lawyer Sheila Paylan in EVN Report, and the conclusion of the OSCE/ODIHR observation mission. Paylan, incidentally, states outright that she voted for Pashinyan and still regards him as the best choice for the country, so she is hardly an “enemy of the authorities.”
The “Imnemnimi” podcasters. In March 2024, Narek Samsonyan and Vazgen Saghatelyan were detained with demonstrative force over sexually explicit insults aimed at the prime minister. In May 2025 they were acquitted. But on 12 November 2025 they aired a seven-hour interview with former president Serzh Sargsyan, and at seven in the morning on the 13th masked National Security Service officers came for them. Both were charged with hooliganism and remanded for two months, and the equipment of the Antifake.am outlet was seized. The trigger was a complaint by Parliament Speaker Alen Simonyan, whom they had cursed in response to his own abuse of them. Simonyan, RCDS recalls, had spat at a citizen who heckled him about two years earlier, and no case was ever opened. Armenia’s leading journalists’ organisations issued a joint statement.
Samvel Karapetyan. On 17 June 2025 he said he would intervene “in his own way” in the campaign against the Church. Pashinyan answered the same day with a stream of angry posts, the businessman’s home was searched that evening, and the next day he was arrested on charges of publicly calling for the seizure of power. Almost simultaneously the prime minister announced the imminent nationalisation of the electricity network ENA, which Karapetyan owns. The charges then widened (taxes, embezzlement, money laundering; he denies everything), and before the elections Pashinyan said Karapetyan should be jailed. Most recently, on 5 November, a court ordered another month of detention for him in a separate proceeding, and on 11 November the charges against his nephew Narek Karapetyan were expanded.
The Church. In 2025 Archbishops Bagrat Galstanyan and Mikael Adjapahyan were arrested in a case over an alleged coup plot (the Church and the Catholicos deny everything). According to critics, in 2026 the case reached the Catholicos himself: per Paylan, on 14 February Karekin II was charged and barred from leaving the country, and in August he and six bishops went on trial over failure to comply with a court order reinstating Bishop Gevorg Saroyan. In her assessment, the canonical decision of who remains a bishop lies within the Church’s own competence, and the authorities have made the aim of changing the Church’s leadership official policy.
After the elections. Two days after the vote Gagik Tsarukyan was barred from leaving the country; on 6 July he was arrested, and the shares of the Ararat cement plant and of a brandy factory were then placed under state management. On 20 May Pashinyan had already declared that the plant “will become state-owned,” although no court had ruled so, and criminal proceedings over the 2002 privatisation had been opened on 7 May, a day before the official campaign began. Robert Kocharyan’s case looked similar: before the elections the prime minister repeatedly said he “must be arrested,” a week after the vote Kocharyan was barred from leaving, then stripped of immunity, and on 25 August he was detained and remanded for two months. Paylan is careful to add that the cases against both men did not come from nowhere: prosecutions of Tsarukyan and Kocharyan had been under way since 2020 and 2018 respectively. But the question of timing remains: what exactly was new after the elections?
The lawyer Liparit Drmeyan. The head of the Office of the Representative on International Legal Matters stated that the emergency arbitrator’s order in the ENA case was legally binding on Armenia. Pashinyan said publicly that the order would not be complied with and told disagreeing officials to resign. Drmeyan was dismissed the next day. He later ran in the elections on Arman Tatoyan’s party list and represented it before the Constitutional Court. A few weeks later the prime minister called him a “Trojan horse,” and the Prosecutor General accepted the prime minister’s verbal report for processing. Drmeyan denies everything and has sued Pashinyan for defamation.
The international observers’ assessment. The OSCE/ODIHR mission, as Paylan relays the words of its head, found that the mass arrests and the cases against opposition candidates and activists created a perception of selective justice, and many opposition supporters held back from campaigning actively. The same mission noted that the elections offered voters a genuine choice and that there had been foreign interference in favour of the opposition. Both things hold at once.
What repeats. First: a public “verdict” from the top figure before any trial or investigation. Paylan calls this incompatible with the presumption of innocence and with the constitutional articles on judicial independence. Second: speed, often the same day or the day after a statement or event. Third: demonstrative form, meaning masks, searches at dozens of addresses, seized equipment. Fourth: a parallel blow to assets or to the work of a media outlet. Fifth: selectivity. Those who stay out of opposition politics or cooperate with the authorities are spared such scrutiny. Paylan cites examples of businessmen whose assets and schemes were left untouched, and as a conclusion proposes looking for neutral criteria that would explain the difference.
An honest caveat is needed. Courts sometimes rule against the prosecution: the podcasters were acquitted, and Tsarukyan was acquitted in 2026 in the case over vote-buying in 2017. That can be read as a sign of judicial independence. But it is also precisely punishment by process: two months in a detention centre, searches, seized equipment and political damage all arrive before the acquittal does. The Danielyan case is built the same way: the pre-trial measure was applied before any trial, and it is still not known even which statement it is for.
Why appeals to the law and to outside threats settle nothing
The position of the authorities and their supporters comes down to two arguments. The first is formal: people are prosecuted under articles on hooliganism and on inciting hatred, that is, under the law. The second is political: the country is under hybrid pressure, and toughness is justified.
Start with the formal argument. The criterion here is not whether an article exists in the code, but what exactly is being punished. Danielyan is in custody over a Facebook post. The investigation does not say which one, and the very qualification, “hooliganism using information technology,” turns words into a criminal offence. Rights groups call detention in connection with expression especially worrying. The case law of the European Court of Human Rights holds that politicians and the authorities must tolerate sharper criticism than private individuals must, and Armenia is bound by the European Convention. Moreover, a law is by definition applied selectively if it is applied to one side only. The RCDS and Freedom House figures discussed above are exactly about this, and RCDS separately notes that coarse and unethical language aimed at opponents is often used by government representatives themselves.
As for the personality of the person arrested, it has no bearing on the principle at all. Every country has its marginal figures, boors and scandal-mongers, and if each of them is jailed, the state doing it changes the standard of what is permissible for everyone. So what must be judged here is not the man but what was done to him.
The second argument, about an external threat, cannot be dismissed as invention: Russian pressure on Armenia is documented, and the EU openly calls the import restrictions economic coercion. In September 2024 the National Security Service announced a foiled plot, and in 2025 two archbishops were arrested on charges of preparing a coup (the Church, the Catholicos and the opposition deny everything, and Jamestown calls the plot “alleged”). But it does not follow that a critical post can be equated with treason. The author in EVN Report, examining the cases of the opposition oligarchs, puts it plainly: the state’s right to defend itself against Russian influence does not substitute for evidence in each specific case, and a pro-Russian stance is not a crime. In Danielyan’s case the charge rests on a statement, not on connections or actions. When a threat is used as the universal explanation for any arrest, it stops being an argument and becomes a backdrop that cancels questions in advance.
It remains to be honest about the limits of what we know. We do not see the case files, and the investigation does not disclose which posts are being charged. DW relies mostly on the assessments of critics, and the official position is represented in the piece only by a general reply from the EU. But the secrecy is itself part of the problem, and the authorities could remove it by publishing the grounds for the charge.
Why Brussels is quiet
DW’s explanation is logical and is borne out by the EU’s own behaviour. In June the European Union quickly allocated Armenia a €34 million aid package, and then announced more than €50 million after Russian restrictions. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas spoke of growing Russian pressure aimed at changing Yerevan’s course. In May an EU summit was held in Yerevan, which the Western press described as historic.
When you have an ally for whom you are already building trade and political support, Brussels very much does not want to say aloud anything that would weaken its position. Meister calls this a trap: the EU accepts the narrative that any criticism of Pashinyan means working for Russia. This is all the more visible against the background of Georgia. There the EU went from expressing concern to a European Commission formulation under which Georgia remains a candidate in name only, and Brussels speaks directly of imprisoned opposition leaders and plans to ban opposition parties. The scale in Armenia is not comparable: no one is banning parties, and the accession process is not frozen. But the Georgian example shows that the EU’s silence is not unlimited. It simply tends to end late.
Risks for the current government
The first risk is reputational. The entire foreign policy construct of the government rests on the image of a country that chose Europe. And the European choice, as even the EU spokesperson reminded, implies not just a direction but values. While Brussels is patient, this goes unnoticed. But enlargement and partnership reports are written every year, and in one of them wording on selective justice may well appear. After that it will no longer be a matter of the opposition’s position or of a single DW article.
The second risk is the “pro-Russian label trap.” If every critic of the authorities is written down as a Kremlin agent, the circle of permissible opposition shrinks to zero. The journalist Aza Babayan says directly that Pashinyan meets any opposition with the stamp of Kremlin espionage. The danger is twofold. On the one hand, people who dislike Moscow but criticise Pashinyan over Karabakh or over the prosecutions are left without a political roof and eventually end up where they would never have wanted to be. On the other, the more often the label is applied without evidence, the less trust there is in genuinely well-founded cases of foreign interference.
The third risk concerns the constitution. After the June elections Civil Contract got about 50 percent of the vote and 64 of 105 seats. That is a solid majority, and after Prosperous Armenia fell just short of the threshold it even grew to three-fifths. But putting a new constitution to a referendum requires two-thirds, and they do not have it. Baku, for its part, insists that without changes to the preamble the peace treaty will not be signed. The government, according to reports, offered the opposition a compromise (resignation if the referendum fails), but so far the opposition refuses. The stronger the atmosphere of criminal cases, the fewer reasons the opposition has to bargain, while for the authorities to win a referendum they need not just a parliamentary majority but the trust of a substantial part of society.
The fourth risk can be called an institutional boomerang. A tool used against opponents today passes to successors tomorrow. This is not abstract: the same articles under which bloggers are prosecuted could be applied to supporters of the current authorities if the balance of power shifts. And investigative bodies perceived as a political instrument lose standing in citizens’ eyes even in the cases where they are right.
The fifth risk has a human dimension. Karabakh refugees, more than 100,000 people, watch some people being tried for harsh words while the harassment aimed at them goes without consequence. That undermines their sense that the state treats them as equals, and such grievances accumulate for years.
One more effect deserves mention: the arrest turns Danielyan into a symbol, regardless of his earlier political weight. Even organisations unlikely to share his views came to his defence. Papyan calls this a moral dilemma, and it concerns civil society itself as well.
Risks for Armenia as a whole
Peace depends on domestic consensus. The treaty was initialled in Washington on 8 August 2025 but has not been signed. Foreign Minister Ararat Mirzoyan summed up Baku’s logic this way: they are not demanding that we change the constitution, they are saying they will not sign otherwise. The draft of the new constitution, according to the justice minister, must be approved by the Constitutional Reform Council by 30 December, and the referendum is planned for 2027. Parliament has already ratified the agreement on the TRIPP route, by 63 votes to 32, and the opposition has substantive criticism of that process. If the question of peace turns into the partisan project of one force, its failure at a referendum, or a change of government after it, could set the country back. Armenia’s time is not unlimited, while for Baku time is working in its favour.
The Russian lever remains powerful. Russia accounts, according to Armenian statistics, for around 35 percent of the republic’s foreign trade, and the EU for about 11. Restrictions on imports of Armenian products have been in force since June, and in October Armenia appealed to the Eurasian Economic Union to declare them illegal barriers, with consideration set for 3 November. Meanwhile the other members of the union issued a report warning of the consequences for trade, the labour market and energy if Armenia leaves the EAEU or moves closer to the EU. European aid is visible, but in scale it is incomparable with this dependence.
European support is geopolitical, and therefore conditional. This is the main takeaway from the words of Grigoryan and Meister. If support rests on the logic of “against Moscow,” it lives as long as that logic is relevant. Should the regional situation change, the question of what exactly makes Armenia interesting to Brussels will come up again. A country whose domestic institutions are fragile will face that question without a safety margin.
A divided society is a vulnerability. The OSCE assessed the June elections as technically well run but held in a highly confrontational atmosphere and with allegations of vote-buying, as the International IDEA overview states. Turnout was 58.9 percent. This is living politics, not an imitation, but when each side regards the other as an existential threat, outside players exploit it, whether Moscow or Baku.
What could reduce the risks
It is important here not to pass off our own recipes as truth: these are options named by participants in the debate. Civil society organisations ask that the authorities disclose which posts form the basis of the case, review the pre-trial measure and discontinue the prosecution. Council of Europe experts proposed clarifying the wording of the law. Critics of the authorities, rights defenders included, speak of one standard for all sides: if people are tried for calls to violence against the prime minister, then similar statements aimed at Karabakh Armenians should also be examined. For Brussels, if one accepts DW’s logic, the way out would be to combine support with clear expectations, as the EU spokesperson puts it when speaking of impartial and independent investigations.
Conclusion
Looking at the facts without labels, the picture is this. The leader of an opposition organisation sits in a detention centre over a statement. The investigation does not disclose which one. Another man, a writer, was detained over a post two years old and barred from publishing on social media. Human rights organisations call this selective, politically motivated practice. Independent analysis of the cases shows that almost all cases under Article 226.2 concern threats against the prime minister and his supporters. Even one of these details is already grounds to speak of a violation of freedom of speech, and taken together they add up to what the authorities’ critics, rights defenders and some observers call a policy of persecuting dissent. This is not label-sticking but a conclusion drawn from a sequence of cases: the Church, opposition oligarchs and their families, deputies and candidates, activists, bloggers, writers.
Honesty also requires naming the other position. The authorities deny the political nature of the cases and point to the law and to real threats, and Armenia is not Georgia: the opposition sits in parliament, parties are not banned, and the elections, by international observers’ assessment, were technically well run, albeit amid allegations of vote-buying. The dispute, then, is not over whether freedom of speech was violated in specific cases (the defenders of the authorities have few arguments there) but over scale and over what to call the phenomenon as a whole. Each reader is entitled to decide this for themselves, and the details of the cases, pointed to in the sources below, make it possible to test both views.
For the authorities themselves the stakes are very high. Whether they manage to carry through the peace process, the referendum and the European course without a split determines not only their own future but whether the country gets a political system that will outlive any government. Repression, if one accepts that assessment, does not help with that but hinders it, because it undermines the very trust without which a referendum cannot be won.
In the coming weeks it is worth watching three things: the court’s decision on extending Danielyan’s detention in early December, the publication of the draft constitution and the opposition’s reaction, and how the European Commission words Armenia’s situation in its next partnership report.
Sources
- DW, Lusine Voskanyan: Armenia’s selective prosecution: a threat to EU relations? (7 November 2026); reprint: Mirror-Spectator
- ArmInfo: Danielyan’s detention and two-month remand
- PAN.am: statement of 11 organisations, Vahram Sahakyan’s detention, court decision on Sahakyan
- Yerevan Press Club / Yerepouni News: Armenia’s selective justice puts free speech at risk
- Caucasian Knot: the Artur Osipyan case
- RCDS (Democracy Watch): Opposition Bloggers Detained in Armenia
- Freedom House on Article 137.1: Caucasus Watch, Azatutyun
- Article 226.2 and the bill: Armenpress; Council of Europe report: Final report on reforming Armenian hate speech laws
- 2026 elections: International IDEA, PACE observation report, EVN Report election live updates
- EVN Report: Please Don’t Make Me Defend an Oligarch
- The Church and coup allegations: Jamestown, AsiaNews; the 2024 case: Wikipedia
- The Karapetyan family cases: 301.am
- The peace process and the constitution: Armenpress, Mirzoyan, The Star (Reuters), QNC News, Saratoga Foundation, Armenian Weekly, TRIPP ratification
- Russia, the EAEU and EU aid: OC Media, ANEWZ, Georgia Today, The Moscow Times, AP on the EU summit in Yerevan
- Other cases: EVN Report, Sheila Paylan: Please Don’t Make Me Defend an Oligarch, RCDS: Opposition Bloggers Detained in Armenia, OC Media, acquittal of the podcasters, Hetq, statement of journalists’ organisations, AP, arrest of Samvel Karapetyan, CivilNet, ENA nationalisation, CivilNet, the Catholicos case, Forum 18, trial of the Catholicos, Armenpress, Kocharyan’s arrest, Hetq, Drmeyan’s dismissal, OSCE/ODIHR observation mission
- Georgia and the EU: RFE/RL, Kyiv Post
