As part of an annual report released on Tuesday, the Platform for the Safety of Journalists also blacklisted neighboring Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia as well Russia and Belarus. The platform consists of 15 watchdogs, including the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists and Paris-based Reporters Without Borders, cooperating with the Council of Europe.
“At the end of 2025, Armenia was recorded for the first time on the Platform with journalists or other media actors in detention, following the pre-trial detention of podcasters Vazgen Saghatelian and Narek Samsonian on hooliganism charges,” says its report.
Samsonian and Saghatelian are currently standing trial for verbally abusing parliament speaker Alen Simonian in response to his personal insults. Simonian branded the two outspoken men as “sons of a b*tch” when he commented on their seven-hour interview with former President Serzh Sarkisian broadcast live on YouTube in early November. They responded to him with offensive language.
Simonian demanded criminal proceedings against them on November 11. Two days later, officers of Armenia’s National Security Service (NSS) demonstratively detained the two podcasters, searching their homes and their Imnemnimi podcast studio in the process. No action was taken against Simonian, who is a leading political ally of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian notorious for spitting at a heckler in Yerevan in 2023.
Both Saghatelian and Samsonian again pleaded not guilty to the hooliganism charge at the start of their trial in January. They said they are prosecuted for exercising their freedom of speech. Samsonian also went on hunger strike in protest against their detention.
He stopped refusing food two weeks later, after prison authorities reluctantly allowed him to undergo surgery at a Yerevan hospital of his choice. An Armenian appeals court moved him to house arrest on February 19. Saghatelian remains in jail.
Ashot Melikian, the chairman of the Yerevan-based Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech, described Armenia’s inclusion on the list of journalist jailers as a blow to its international reputation. He said it was an inevitable consequence of the “disproportionate measures” taken against the two pro-opposition podcasters.
“The mere fact that journalists are in prison is enough of a reason for serious [international] criticism,” Melikian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service.
Dozens of other critics of Pashinian, including an opposition mayor and three archbishops of the Armenian Apostolic Church, have also been prosecuted in recent months in what the Armenian opposition calls a pre-election government crackdown on dissent. The authorities deny that they are political prisoners.
