Armenian Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan waves to supporters at a courtroom in Yerevan on 25 August 2025. photo: Narek Aleksanyan
Guest contribution from Alison Tahmizian Meuse
YEREVAN—Two charismatic archbishops, a philanthropist, the father of a martyred soldier, and a young female activist are among the political prisoners Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s administration put behind bars or house arrest this summer under the pretext of maintaining “peace.”
They are accused of seeking to overthrow Pashinyan’s government, and like more than 50% of Armenia’s prison population, are being held in pre-trial detention — a tool increasingly relied on by the authorities to physically bar key critics and organizers from civic engagement.
The timeline of these cases is linked to Pashinyan’s drive to hammer through his political agenda ahead of June 2026 elections, when his government faces a growing threat of removal at the ballot box.
“The common agenda, at least at the domestic politics level, is preparation for the next elections,” said Rafael Ishkhanyan, a lawyer and co-founder of the Armenian Center for Political Rights. “The more opposition figures you discredit, the less competition you will have.”
Ishkhanyan noted that the ruling party works to lump together Pashinyan’s critics, whether opposition political parties, former presidents, or the Church. “Discrediting one means discrediting all, if you manage to make the impression that all of them are in the same boat,” he said.
Crucially, Armenia’s political prisoners were all neutralized from public life ahead of Pashinyan’s August 8 Washington summit with Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev, in which Armenia agreed to cede its strategic southern border with Iran as a bypass on the Middle Corridor linking Turkey with Baku and Central Asia. Crucially, the deal pledges “unimpeded” passage to Azerbaijan.
Prisoners of conscience
Armenia’s political prisoners are being prosecuted in multiple trials, but the main three cases concern Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan and his supporters, Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, who heads the Shirak Diocese, and philanthropist-tycoon Samvel Karapetyan.
What these individuals have in common is they have dedicated their lives to Armenia, the struggle for Artsakh’s self-determination, and the Armenian Apostolic Church. Most crucially, they are not at peace with Pashinyan’s ceaseless political, legal and land concessions — and they believe that peace can only be achieved through a balance of power.
Karapetyan, a top employer and taxpayer in Armenia through his Tashir Group, bought the Electricity Networks of Armenia in 2015 and has since invested more than half a billion U.S. dollars to modernize its infrastructure.
Born in the northern Armenian province of Lori, and having built his fortune in Russia, Karapetyan is known for giving back, from building a state-of-the-art hospital in Stepanakert, the capital of the ceded Artsakh Republic, to backing the renovation of the Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiatzin, the seat of Armenian Christendom.
Karapetyan broke from his usual aversion to politics on June 17, when he spoke out forcefully against Pashinyan’s attacks on the Church and Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II. Within 24 hours, Armenia’s security and judicial apparatus had detained Karapetyan and launched a war on his business enterprises — from the Tashir Pizza chain to the Electricity Networks.
Though Karapetyan’s Cyprus-registered Tashir Group secured a key ruling from a Stockholm arbitration court ordering Pashinyan’s government to hold fire on its seizure of the Electricity Networks, Pashinyan ignored the ruling – against the counsel of Armenia’s Head of Office for International Legal Affairs, Liparid Drmeyan.
“I am the government,” Pashinyan told reporters when prodded. Drmeyan was sacked the following day, while Pashinyan appointed a loyalist as his new chief legal representative. Last month, Karapetyan spent his 60th birthday in prison.
Faith leaders
Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, 53, similarly stepped into the political arena in response to moves by Pashinyan — launching a sit-in with residents of Armenia’s northeastern province of Tavush to protest the forceful handover of villages in his Diocese to Azerbaijan. Met with force by the police and unable to halt the transfer, the Archbishop led a march in May 2024 to Yerevan, where he was met by a crowd of tens of thousands of people — rivaling the street uprising that brought Pashinyan to power in 2018.
Archbishop Galstanyan’s “Holy Struggle” movement did not succeed in halting Pashinyan’s agenda. Galstanyan backed down from confrontation after police used stun grenades against his followers — including women, children and journalists. However, the movement demonstrated the mass discontent in Armenia over Pashinyan’s agenda, and a core team of supporters have continued since that gathering to stage civic actions.
Galstanyan and fourteen of his followers were detained in raids on June 25. While they are accused of plotting to seize power through illegal means, the group’s lawyers have already proven that the authorities cut and pasted audio to falsify evidence.
Others later detained in the dragnet alongside Archbishop Galstanyan include individuals from outside his movement, but similarly known for their dedication to Armenia, Artsakh and the Church.
One example is Vahagn Chakhalyan, a community organizer from the Armenian-majority Javakh region of Georgia, who was similarly persecuted by Georgia’s former authorities and landed in jail after butting heads with them for years over Turkish and Azeri influence in Georgia. Freed in a 2013 amnesty, he moved to Armenia and went on to volunteer in defense of Artsakh in the 2016 and 2020 wars.
Chakhalyan, 43, leads a tight-knit group of followers who for months have been holding a weekly protest outside the government building in Yerevan, demanding action to secure the release of Armenian captives in Baku. He was among the first to arrive at Etchmiatzin on June 27 to defend the Mother See from the armed police sent to detain Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan.
Armenian police forces attempt to block a delegation led by the Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, flanked to his right by Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, during the annual visit to the Sardarabad Monument on 28 May 2025. photo: Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America
The Archbishop decided to go to the police on his own terms; Chakhalyan was grabbed from his vehicle later that night while holding vigil outside the State Investigative Committee building. Though released from that initial seizure, Chakhalyan was officially detained three days later and has been included in the case against Archbishop Galstanyan.
Archbishop Ajapahyan is being tried separately for comments made during an interview in which he said that in a normal country, Pashinyan would have been removed from power. The 61-year-old Gyumri native espouses a gruff and often painfully blunt “tough love” for his flock.
Ajapahyan would pose a major obstacle to Pashinyan’s’ crusade to unseat the Catholicos and thus break the Armenian Church’s more than 1,700-year chain of Apostolic succession. He has been a stalwart at the side of the Catholicos Karekin II throughout Pashinyan’s antics. In May of last year, Archbishop Ajapahyan physically pushed aside police attempting to block His Holiness’ annual visit to Sardarabad — a monument to the 1918 battle in which outgunned Armenian forces halted advancing Turkish troops, leading to the creation of an Armenian state at a juncture when defeat would have spelled the end of Armenia itself.
A Swiss start
The Armenian Apostolic Church today polls as the most trusted institution in Armenia, and its influence extends far beyond the Republic’s borders to Armenian faithful the world over.
That trust level stands in sharp contrast to the unpopularity of Pashinyan, demonstrated not only in polls but in April at the ballot box, when his ruling party lost to an opposition coalition in elections in Armenia’s second-largest city, Gyumri.
The Church, with its international influence and function as a bridge to the Armenian Diaspora, poses a threat to Pashinyan’s quest to confine Armenianness within the borders of Soviet-era maps — a concept he refers to as “Real Armenia.”
The Church’s leadership was on display on May 27 in Bern, Switzerland, where Catholicos Karekin II made a landmark speech to the World Council of Churches, defending the rights of Artsakh Armenians to their ancestral lands and unique Christian heritage.
The speech, while grounded on international law and justice, could not avoid being taken as a challenge by Pashinyan, whose political agenda calls for memory-holing genocide and confining Armenian national interests to the Republic’s threatened borders.
Pashinyan, whose government had already removed Armenian Church History from the national curriculum and the Catholicos’ annual New Year’s Eve message from public TV, seized on the Bern speech as a challenge to his “peace” agenda. Within days, he began firing off vulgar tirades against the Church and its leadership and vowing to lead a movement to unseat the Catholicos.
The Church has not faced such an existential threat since the harshest years of the Soviet purges and consolidation of power, namely the 1938 murder of Catholicos Khoren I and subsequent seven-year vacancy of the post. A new Catholicos finally took office in 1945, when repression of religion eased.
What Pashinyan seeks is to subjugate the Church to his one-party rule — a move that contradicts Armenia’s constitutional guarantee of separation of religion and state, as well as the special recognition of the Armenian Apostolic Church as the national church.
Those individuals who Pashinyan has placed behind bars are those who possess the faith, will and potential capacity to spur Armenians to national salvation.
Political prisoners held in Armenia’s jails or under house arrest as of 9 September 2025
This list may not be exhaustive.
| Prisoner of conscience | Date of detention |
| Gagik Sargsyan | March 14, 2024 |
| Garik Galeyan | September 9, 2024 |
| Samvel Karapetyan | June 18, 2025 |
| Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Garo Okumushyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Lydia Mantashyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Tigran Topalyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Tigran Galstyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Arsen Ghazaryan | June 25, 2025 |
| Davit Galstyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Mihran Makhsudyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Aghvan Arshakyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Igor Sargsyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Ara Rostomyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Armen Aleksanyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Movses Sharbatyan | June 25, 2025 |
| Archbishop Mikayel Ajapahyan | June 27, 2025 |
| Vahagn Chakhalyan | July 5, 2025 |
| Artur Sargsyan | July 9, 2025 |
| Andranik Asatryan | July 11, 2025 |
| Aleksan Asatryan | July 12, 2025 |
| Ruben Hakobyan | July 18, 2025 |
Alison Tahmizian Meuse is a veteran foreign correspondent who has covered West Asia for AFP, NPR and other major outlets for more than a decade. You can follow her on X @alitahmizian.
