Supporters of the Armenian Apostolic Church have staged a protest against the Armenian Foreign Minister, Ararat Mirzoyan, on account of his government’s treatment of the church.
The protest took place at a gathering last week of the Council of Europe, where Mirzoyan was speaking. Mirzoyan was also questioned by British Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leigh, who suggested the Armenian government was guilty of violating freedom of speech and religion within the country.
Relations between the federal government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and the Church have been strained since Pashinyan got here to power following the “Velvet Revolution” in 2018. Relations declined still further after Armenia’s defeat within the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war and subsequent territorial concessions to Azerbaijan in 2023–2024.
The leader of the Church, Catholicos Karekin II, has criticised the federal government’s foreign policy failures and apparently given support to opposition protesters.
The government in turn has cracked down on what it perceives to be dissent, with between a 3rd and one half of the Church’s bishops reportedly being arrested. One of them, Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, was sentenced to 2 years in jail in September for supposedly encouraging the overthrow of the federal government by undemocratic means.
Armenian prosecutors justified his imprisonment by pointing to a lot of statements made by the archbishop appearing to call for a coup. In one instance, he told News.am, “I called for a coup to avoid wasting the country from this madman, they are usually not saving it, also they are guilty of all this. This shouldn’t be only a call, it have to be done.”
Protesters accused Pashinyan of “political persecution and the imprisonment of people for his or her political or religious positions undermine democracy, public trust, and the rule of law” and called in a petition for “an instantaneous end to political repression within the Republic of Armenia”.
Pashinyan, has claimed that his government is attempting to avoid wasting the Church from “anti-Christian” and “anti-state” activists. He has further said that the Church will come under greater government control, with the intention of making a “real, pure, and state-centred Church”. Critics have accused Pashinyan of acting like a Soviet-era dictator.
At a gathering of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, Sir Edward Leigh questioned Foreign Minister Mirzoyan about his government’s actions. He described the Armenian Apostolic Church as “one in all the last bastions of independent thought” within the country.
He accused Pashinyan of attempting to create a church that’s “banned from dissenting from the state … to this end he has arrested a 3rd of the bishops of Armenia. How is that this anything apart from a violation of the democratic rights of freedom of faith and freedom of speech that the Council of Europe is imagined to uphold?”
In response, Mirzoyan stated that Leigh was referring to a “rumour” that needed to be “clarified”.
He said, “I completely disagree with a few of your qualifications and I’m afraid your information shouldn’t be completely true … There isn’t any persecution of clergymen in Armenia.”
“Some residents of Armenia call for the violent removal of democratically elected government from power through coup d’etats and … public calls for assassination of a number of the leadership of Armenia – including myself by the way in which …. The very sad reality in Armenia [is] we do have some clergymen who did this.”
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