By Arshaluys Barseghyan

OC Media

Armenian authorities have launched a criminal case against a Nagorno-Karabakh Armenian for ‘inciting and propagating hatred, intolerance, and hostility’ towards Yerevan and the police.

The charges were brought against Gharib Babayan, the head of the Independent Centre for Strategic Studies, after the organisation published a video on 30 January showing a group of men singing about Nagorno-Karabakh in Azerbaijani in Yerevan’s Republic Square.

Accompanying the video was a caption written in Russian, which alleged the people singing were Azerbaijani. The text also pointed to police inaction, questioning what would happen if a group of young Armenians would sing a song, even if not nationalistic, in Armenian in Baku.

‘What have these corrupt scumbags in power turned our country into that the Azeris behave so brazenly and impudently in the centre of Yerevan?’, the caption on Facebook read.

The video went viral on social media the same evening it was published.

The next day, the Armenian National Security Service (NSS) identified the men in the video, publishing their names and faces, stating that all of them were Iranian who had been visiting Armenia from 30 December 2024 to 3 January 2025.

On Saturday, the Armenian Investigative Committee announced that they had brought charges against Babayan, based on the report from the NSS.

Babayan was placed under administrative arrest on Saturday. If found guilty, he could face up to four years imprisonment.

Armenia’s Human Rights Defender called the article under which the criminal prosecution was launched ‘concerning’. Similarly, ex-human rights defender Arman Tatoyan claimed that the case was ‘completely illegal, unconstitutional’.

‘The text published by 70-year-old Artsakh Armenian Gharib Babayan is not hatred by any international standard. It is a critical speech with appropriate questions’, Tatoyan wrote on Facebook.

In turn, Babayan’s friend, Artur Osipyan, told CivilNet that ‘government propagandists’ were trying to link Babayan’s activities with Russia, claiming that such accusations were not true.

For instance, Gnel Sargsyan, a former member of the ruling Civil Contract party, claimed that ‘this looks like another organised media act of terrorism’.

Tigran Grigoryan, political analyst and the head of the Regional Centre for Democracy and Security in Yerevan, wrote on Facebook that the case could be part of the Armenian authority’s need ‘to combat hybrid threats’, which was also highlighted in a recent report by the Foreign Intelligence Service.

‘I think the authorities perceived the release of that video as a hybrid operation, and they decided to take active steps. In that sense, the concerns that under the guise of combating hybrid threats, the authorities would simply become more repressive were legitimate’, Grigoryan wrote.

He also stated that the ruling party and affiliated civil society had ‘the perception that the people of Artsakh are a hybrid threat and can be used against the sovereignty of Armenia’.