Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian was arrested on June 27 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.
The case against the 62-year-old cleric highly critical of the government 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.
Ajapahian, who heads the church diocese in Armenia’s Shirak province, rejected the accusation as politically motivated during his unusually quick trial which ended on October 3 in a two-year prison sentence handed to him by a court of first instance. He appealed against the verdict. His lawyers maintain that the respected cleric must be acquitted because he expressed a political opinion and never planned to try to put it into practice.
They are now planning to challenge in the Strasbourg court the legality of earlier court decisions that allowed investigators to hold him in detention before the guilty verdict. One of the defense lawyers, Ara Zohrabian, said the decisions violated articles of the European Convention on Human Rights guaranteeing citizens’ freedom of speech and right to fair trial and prohibiting their discriminatory treatment by law-enforcement bodies.
Zohrabian insisted that Ajapahian was accused of committing the kind of a crime that did not require his pre-trial detention. He said that his client could not have fled the country or influenced non-existent witnesses in the case.
The authorities reluctantly allowed Ajapahian last month to undergo urgent surgery at a Yerevan hospital of his choice, the Izmirlian Medical Center. He has not yet been moved back to prison due to his continuing recovery in the hospital.
The archbishop has continued to make defiant statements after his arrest. In his Christmas message to supporters released on Tuesday, he again condemned Pashinian’s efforts to oust Garegin and poured scorn on ten bishops who openly joined that campaign in November.
Ajapahian was taken into custody two days after another archbishop, Bagrat Galstanian, and his 15 supporters were arrested on charges of plotting “terrorist acts” in a bid to seize power. They all deny the charges. In October, the authorities arrested Bishop Mkrtich Proshian, Garegin’s nephew heading another church diocese. They claim that Proshian had forced his subordinates to attend opposition rallies in Yerevan, a charge he strongly denies.
The crackdown on clergy loyal to the Catholicos continued with the arrest on December 4 of Archbishop Arshak Khachatrian, the head of the church’s Mother See Chancellery in Echmiadzin. Khachatrian is facing drug-related charges rejected by him as politically motivated.
