YEREVAN (Azatutyun.am)—Armenian law-enforcement authorities have eased but not dropped criminal charges that were brought against the exiled mayor of Nagorno-Karabakh’s capital Stepanakert shortly after he signaled support for antigovernment protests in Yerevan.
Davit Sargsyan as well as the mayors of two other Karabakh towns, Martakert and Askeran, were among refugees from Karabakh who met with the leader of those protests, Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, on May 21. They were charged with fraud and embezzlement in the following days. They all denied the accusations.
Sargsyan and Martakert’s Misha Gyurjyan were arrested pending investigation while Askeran’s Hayk Shamirian was placed under house arrest. Sargsyan and Gyurjyan were subsequently also moved to house arrest. Sargsyan is currently under so-called “administrative surveillance” which does not allow him to leave home after 7 p.m.
Investigators said that the three men illegally registered municipal vehicles in their or their relatives’ names after fleeing to Armenia together with over 100,000 other Karabakh Armenians in September 2023. The mayors’ lawyers countered that the Armenian traffic police themselves had told them early this year to change, with their local councils’ permission, ownership of those cars in order to have them registered in Armenia.
Prosecutors dropped the cases against the Martakert and Askeran mayors in October following an Armenian government decision that essentially legalized the ownership change. As for Sargsyan, they replaced late last week the fraud and embezzlement charges against the Stepanakert mayor by a lighter accusation defined by the Armenian Criminal Code as “arbitrariness.” Seven members of Stepanakert’s municipal council were also charged with the same crime.
One of Sargsyan’s lawyers, Ruben Melikyan, decried the move, saying that the new accusation is just as “absurd.” He said the criminal case will be sent to court “very soon.”
Melikyan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Monday that his client is still being prosecuted because at least one of the four municipal cars brought by him is not on a government list of vehicles cleared for new ownership.
Sargsyan’s wife, Erna Javadyan, claimed, for her part, that the Armenian authorities remain determined to keep him under “house semi-arrest” and put him on trial in order to preclude his political activities.
Armenian opposition figures have likewise said that the authorities indicted the three mayors in a bid to intimidate Karabakh Armenians and discourage them from participating in the Galstanyan-led demonstrations aimed at toppling Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
In June, Pashinyan publicly threatened to crack down on Karabakh’s exiled leadership, saying that it is encouraging the refugees to join the protests triggered by his decision to hand over several disputed border areas to Azerbaijan. One week later, police broke into Karabakh’s permanent representation in Yerevan to impound a car used by Samvel Shahramanyan, the exiled president.
Karabakh’s leading political groups condemned the raid. In a joint statement, they accused Pashinian’s government of unleashing repressions and discriminating against Karabakh Armenians.
