Bagrat Galstanyan is Armenia’s most outspoken cleric. @SrbazanBagrat/X
On June 25 this year, Armenian authorities arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, an outspoken critic of the prime minister, along with 12 of his associates and employees of his diocese. He was the first of several high-ranking clergy to be imprisoned by the Armenian government in 2025.
In 2024, Archbishop Galstanyan had led a civil disobedience movement in Yerevan, seeking the resignation of Armenia’s Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, after the government unilaterally ceded territory in his diocese to Azerbaijan.
After their arrest a year later, the archbishop and the other detainees were charged with plotting a coup against the Armenian government. Investigators published audio recordings that seemed to show the archbishop discussing using violence to seize power in Armenia.
But these recordings—the only piece of evidence tying Archbishop Galstanyan to planned acts of violence—were heavily doctored and knowingly disseminated as such by Armenia’s state apparatus, the Armenian Center for Political Rights (ACPR) told reporters in Yerevan on December 10.
A new report from the Yerevan-based NGO shows how state investigators cherry-picked from troves of wiretapped conversations gathered over the past year and pasted together unrelated fragments to create a false picture of guilt.
The full recordings were under embargo until the investigative period concluded on August 11.
Once the full recordings were released, legal and human rights experts in Armenia quickly realized that the previously released edits—upon which the case against Archbishop Bagrat was based—had been distorted. On August 12, Tigran Grigoryan, a Yerevan-based analyst at the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, wrote, “This means that Armenian law enforcement falsified and edited evidence to detain an opposition figure.”
By the time the full recordings were released, the damage was done.
Detained on falsified evidence
“Injustice in Armenia: Mass Political Persecutions of 2025, Part A,” a report by ACPR whose English version was released on December 9, details how Armenia’s Investigative Committee relied on falsified evidence to build its case against Armenian dissidents.
Most notably, a private conversation between Archbishop Galstanyan and a Harvard-educated professor that briefly touched on using capital punishment for desertion cases—and occurred in the context of a discussion comparing military models in Finland and other countries, and their potential application in Armenia—was spliced together with an entirely separate discussion about civil disobedience tactics that could be used in Yerevan. The splice created the false impression that the archbishop’s supporters planned to mow down citizens who stood in the way of a violent seizure of power.
The doctored audio file, one of seven released by Armenia’s Investigative Committee on June 25, became the go-to reference used by Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and other key ruling party officials to justify labeling the defendants as “terrorists” even before the trial began.
The defense lawers for the accused were meanwhile barred from publishing the full-length wiretap recordings—which would have cleared their clients of wrongdoing.
A spectrogram analysis of the recordings released by Armenia’s general prosecutor’s office, as shown in the ACPR report. The red arrows indicate the gap where two different recordings have been spliced together.
The Investigative Committee’s transcript of the aforementioned audio file went even further than the doctored audio, adding in a phrase about “wiping out” people. This phrase, the ACPR emphasizes, is nowhere to be found in the doctored recording, but instead “it was fabricated and added by the Investigative Committee,” which also included it in an English translation.
And yet the prosecutor general still relied on the manipulated transcript from the Investigative Committee in pursuing charges that the defendants planned to engage in acts of terrorism.
Guilty before trial
The seemingly incriminating audio was spread from the bully pulpit of the prime minister and his fellow cabinet members—who labeled Archbishop Galstanyan and fellow activists, including a female social media manager named Lidya and a young deacon named Hrayr from Artsakh, as “terrorists.”
Even officials with totally unrelated portfolios joined the public pile-on. The minister of health took to Facebook to condemn the defendants during the pre-trial investigation as “terroristic, vile, malignant, despicable traitors.”
In publicly accusing the defendants of guilt before trial, Pashinyan and his cabinet members contaminated the process before it even began—making clear the required outcome to an judicial system which the prime minister has gone to great lengths to bring under his control.
The accusations appeared intended to stoke fear among a public that expresses high trust in the Armenian Apostolic Church, but considers security among its chief concerns.
The charges against the clergy may also serve to preclude pushback from international human rights groups and institutions of the Armenian diaspora, who could be less inclined to go to bat if such serious accusations are at play and the Church and top clergy are seen to be radioactive.
The ACPR in its report suggested that the charge of terrorism may be intended to keep Archbishop Galstanyan and others from being categorized as political prisoners by international bodies or embassies.
Already, the Pashinyan administration’s use of the courts to prosecute clergy, media and opposition figures appears to have muddied the waters.
Reporters without Borders did not include two prominent Armenian podcasters, who were dragged from their homes by masked internal security forces in mid-November and are currently held in pre-trial detention on the nebulous charge of “hooliganism,” on its global index of detained journalists.
And shortly after Archbishop Galstanyan was arrested in June, French President Emmanuel Macron declared his support for the Armenian government and the actions it was taking to protect “democracy.”
Infrastructure of persecution
While Armenia’s state apparatus melded wiretapped conversations to concoct cases, its public mouthpieces worked to convince the public that disparate cases were part of one grand conspiracy, according to the ACPR report.
Top government officials and affiliated media seek to convince the public that the charges against a prominent businessman, the Armenian Church clergy, grassroots activists, and the country’s oldest opposition party, are all linked.
“By prior agreement and as part of an organized group, they procured the means and tools allegedly necessary to commit acts of terrorism and to seize state power,” Armenia’s Prosecutor General Anna Vardapetyan told parliamentarians on July 7.
The case against Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was based entirely on his statement—years before—that Armenia’s generals were cowards for not having carried out a coup, which he believed was necessary to save the country.
But it was only in 2025 that Archbishop Ajapahyan was prosecuted and charged for repeating the very same thought. The difference was that Pashinyan’s campaign against the Church and opposition had gone into overdrive.
“These are separate incidents, but what combines them, the common thread, is that now we have the infrastructure of political persecution in place,” ACPR President Rafael Ishkhanyan told Christian Solidarity International (CSI) by phone on December 10.
“From the law enforcement to judiciary and the media, to the carte blanche from the international community—everything at this moment, all instruments for political persecution, are in place, and up and running for the Armenian government,” he said.
Ishkhanyan said his organization, founded with a group of fellow lawyers in 2023, does not anticipate that the U.S. or European embassies in Armenia will express concerns regarding Pashinyan’s methods of quelling internal dissent, given their support for his policies.
“Maybe it was worth coming to this point, where we understand that for these political structures, the values and standards of human rights are not priorities,” he said.
The ACPR’s latest report should, however, he said, serve as an alarm and resource for international bodies, including the OSCE and UN, and independent U.S. government bodies like the Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), that are mandated to safeguard human rights and monitor the implementation of treaties.
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.
