The violence followed a disputed presidential election in which former President Levon Ter-Petrosian was the main opposition candidate. Scores of his supporters clashed with riot police on March 1-2, 2008 during an opposition rally in central Yerevan led by Nikol Pashinian, then a newspaper editor. Eight protesters and two police personnel died before outgoing President Robert Kocharian declared a state of emergency and ordered Armenian army units into the capital.
Dozens of people, including Pashinian, were arrested and jailed in an ensuing crackdown on the Ter-Petrosian-led opposition accused of organizing the “mass disturbances” in a bid topple the government. They strongly denied the accusations, saying that the authorities rigged the election and used lethal force to ensure the handover of power from Kocharian to his preferred successor, Serzh Sarkisian.
Pictures of the ten people killed in the March 2008 post-election unrest in Yerevan are displayed during an opposition rally marking its 8th anniversary, 1Mar2016.
Investigators completely changed the official version of events after Pashinian swept to power in 2018. Kocharian and about a dozen former officials were indicted in connection with the crackdown.
The ex-president, his former chief of staff and two retired army generals were charged with an “overthrow of the constitutional order” but acquitted in 2021 after Armenia’s Constitutional Court ruled that the accusation, rejected by them as politically motivated, is unconstitutional. They again went on trial last year after the court allowed prosecutors to bring a different accusation stemming from the 2008 use of force.
The ECHR ruled on a collective lawsuit filed in 2011 by the families of the eight protesters as well as an interior troops conscript, Tigran Abgarian, killed during the unrest. It said that seven of the victims, including Abgarian, died as a result of a “badly planned and executed operation involving the improper use of crowd-control weapons and the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of lethal force.”
Opposition leader Nikol Pashinian addresses protesters that barricaded themselves in central Yerevan, 1 March 2008.
The Strasbourg-based court said security forces thus violated their “right to life” guaranteed by a European convention on human rights. It found no such violation with respect to the two other protesters.
“One victim died from a head wound from an unidentified object, while the other had been shot and died in unknown circumstances,” said the ECHR.
Still, the court ordered the Armenian government to pay 30,000 euros ($35,000) in damages to each of the families that appealed to it. It also concluded that the former authorities in Yerevan had done “very little” to identify those responsible for the deaths.
No law-enforcement official was prosecuted and tried in connection with the deaths even after the 2018 regime change. Nevertheless, Pashinian has repeatedly claimed since becoming prime minister that the high-profile case been solved.
“The guilty are those who are being tried in court,” Pashinian said on Thursday, clearly alluding to Kocharian and the other former officials.
The 71-year-old ex-president, who now leads the opposition Hayastan alliance, has blamed the deaths on Pashinian, citing what he sees as inflammatory speeches delivered by the latter during the March 2008 rally.
