Gyumri-based Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian was taken into custody the day after Pashinian threatened to forcibly remove the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church from his Echmiadzin headquarters. He was charged with calling for a violent overthrow of the Armenian government.
Ajapahian, who heads the church diocese in Armenia’s Shirak province, rejected the accusation as politically motivated during his unusually quick trial which ended in October in a two-year prison sentence. He appealed against the verdict handed down by a Yerevan court of first instance. Prosecutors also filed an appeal, demanding a slightly longer sentence for the vocal critic of Pashinian.
The Court of Appeals overturned the verdict, freed Ajapahian from house arrest but stopped short of formally acquitting him. It backed defense lawyers’ claims that under Armenian law he should have been tried by a court in Gyumri. He will therefore stand a new trial there.
The 63-year-old cleric, who was moved to house arrest in February, described the latest ruling as “insufficient,” saying that he should have been cleared of the “fabricated” charges altogether. But one of his lawyers, Ara Zohrabian, described it as “courageous.”
The case against Ajapahian is based on a June 2025 interview in which he lamented the Armenian military’s failure to topple Pashinian and thus “save” Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh following the 2020 war with Azerbaijan. The Office of the Prosecutor-General had concluded that similar remarks made by him in previous years do not warrant criminal charges.
Security forces met with fierce resistance from hundreds of angry priests and laymen when they raided the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin on June 27, 2025 in a failed attempt to demonstratively detain Ajapahian there. The latter surrendered to investigators several hours after the unprecedented raid.
Two days earlier, they arrested Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian and his 15 supporters on charges of plotting “terrorist acts” in a bid to seize power. As Pashinian stepped up pressure on Garegin, two other bishops were arrested in October and December on separate charges which they too rejected as politically motivated. They were placed under house arrest early this year.
Around the same time, a law-enforcement agency indicted six other bishops and Garegin himself but refrained from arresting them. The Catholicos made clear on June 2 that he will not resign even if he is arrested after the June 7 parliamentary elections.
