The Armenian government has charged the leader of the Armenian Apostolic Church with obstructing the enforcement of a judicial act and has forbidden him from leaving the country.
The Church has been at loggerheads with the federal government of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan since he got here to power in 2018, but relations soured significantly following Armenia’s defeat within the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war.
The government has accused senior church leaders of supporting the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government and of condoning calls for the assassination of presidency ministers. Numerous Church leaders have been arrested.
Pashinyan has indicated that he effectively desires to nationalise the Church. He claims that he’s attempting to save lots of it from “anti-Christian” and “anti-state” activists and needs to create a “real, pure, and state-centred Church”. Critics, nevertheless, have accused Pashinyan of behaving like a Soviet-ear dictator who brooks no dissent.
Such is the state of relations between the Church and the state, that the Church has decided to carry its next Synod in Austria to debate “recent developments across the Church”.
The leader of the Church, Catholicos Karekin II, had been attributable to attend, but attributable to his travel ban, he’ll now be dialling in via Zoom.
In a separate development, Samvel Karapetyan, a high-profile supporter of the Church who’s currently being held in detention, announced his intention to run against Pashinyan at the following election.
As well as being detained, Karapetyan has also had a lot of his assets seized by the Armenian government, most notably Electric Networks of Armenia, which for a few years had an efficient monopoly on the Armenian electricity market.
In an announcement Karapetyan said, “By arresting me and keeping me in detention, a tiny clique believed they may silence and isolate not only me, however the voice of Armenia, the voice of our people, the voice of our residents – the voice of all of you.”
Legal representatives of Karapetyan accused Europe and the West of a “shameful” silence on the arrest of Christians in Armenia.
Robert Amsterdam, of the law firm Amsterdam & Partners said, “Now is the moment for the West and the Armenian people to defend the values of freedom of faith and conscience.”
The British government has said that it’s “monitoring the situation”.
John Eibner, President of Christian Solidarity International (CSI), has called on the UK to do more to challenge the Armenian leadership and secure the discharge of imprisoned Church leaders and supporters.
He questioned why UK Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and other government ministers “remain tight-lipped, despite selectively posing as defenders of democracy, human rights and spiritual freedom in other contexts”.
“As the UK faces its own mounting civilizational challenges, the earlier His Majesty’s Government ceases to appease powers intent on the deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian civilization we share with Armenia, the safer the British Isles might be,” he said.
“This civilization and the religious freedom that uphold it are the strength and security of the UK a minimum of Armenia.”
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