YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, a major opposition party involved in antigovernment protests in Yerevan, on Tuesday rejected as politically motivated criminal charges brought against nine of its activists.
Law-enforcement authorities on Friday raided ARF offices in the southeastern Vayots Dzor province and rounded up the party’s provincial leader and a dozen local members. They went on to also arrest Gerasim Vartanian, a Yerevan-based member of the party’s governing body in Armenia.
The vast majority of the activists were charged over the weekend with paying people to participate in the protests led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan. According to Artsvik Minasyan, a ARF leader, Armenian courts remanded five of them, including Vartanian, in pre-trial custody and moved three others to house arrest.
The accusations brought by the Investigative Committee are based on an audio of three wiretapped phone conversations posted on the website of a media outlet controlled by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s Civil Contract party. The law-enforcement agency posted the audio on its website without clarifying who recorded it.
One of the recordings purportedly features Vartanian and a local ARF activist. Vartanian, who already spent seven months in jail in 2022, described the accusations as “lies” when he briefly spoke to RFE/RL’s Armenian Service while being arrested on Saturday.
Lawyers representing him and other suspects likewise insisted that the recordings do not corroborate the accusations. They said the party activists only discussed the purchase of fuel for cars and buses that transported opposition supporters from Vayots Dzor to Yerevan for free.
Minasyan charged, for his part, that the criminal proceedings are aimed at intimidating and discrediting ARF. The investigators, he said, are also trying to prove Pashinyan’s allegations made in the Armenian parliament a week ago. The prime minister accused protest leaders of paying refugees from Nagorno-Karabakh to attend the rallies aimed at toppling him.
A total of 59 supporters of Archbishop Galstanyan have been prosecuted since the start of the antigovernment protests in late April. Twenty-nine of them are currently held in detention on various charges denied by them.
A key member of the main opposition Hayastan alliance, ARF has been at the forefront of the demonstrations. Riot police allegedly tried to enter the party’s Yerevan headquarters during one of the protests staged on May 27.
Several policemen were caught on camera punching, kicking and swearing at a ARF lawmaker, Ashot Simonyan, outside the headquarters. None of them was prosecuted for the violent conduct.