09/24/2025
BREAKING: Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan, head of the Shirak Diocese, has been found guilty of “calling for the seizure of power” under Article 422 Part 2 of Armenia’s Criminal Code. He will remain in prison until a court hearing on September 29 at 15:30, when the length of his sentence will be decided.
On June 28 armed NSS forces stormed the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin during a clergy assembly. Over a thousand supporters prevented the arrest, forcing the NSS to withdraw, and later that day Ajapahyan went to Yerevan voluntarily to face investigators.
He was placed under a two-month pre-trial detention order, which the courts extended on August 15 and September 2. The proceedings moved with abnormal speed, defense motions were dismissed, and the case was built only on excerpts from sermons and speeches. Words were turned into charges of “seizing power.”
Ajapahyan’s conviction is part of a broader campaign by Pashinyan and his team to weaken the Armenian Apostolic Church after it organized a conference in Switzerland on the destruction of Armenian heritage in Artsakh. Instead of supporting the initiative, Pashinyan escalated his attacks, accusing Catholicos Karekin II of violating vows and fathering a child, addressing him by his given name, threatening to remove him from Etchmiadzin, and insisting that the state must control future Catholicoi elections. He compared this to his “liberation” of Armenia in 2018. His team amplified the campaign through state-linked media, mocking clergy and spreading defamatory claims to isolate the Church from its people.
The guilty verdict against Archbishop Ajapahyan follows the persecution of others who supported the Church. Philanthropist Samvel Karapetyan was detained first, then Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, followed by 17 members of the “Sacred Struggle” movement. Their trials are ongoing despite earlier arrests. Each case shows the same pattern: fabricated charges, intimidation, and courts reduced to instruments of power.
With no evidence presented, this conviction cannot be called justice. It proves Armenia’s legal system has been stripped of independence and now serves political repression.