Opposition Activist Sentenced to 2 Years in Prison for Assaulting Police Officer

Yerevan’s Kentron and Nork-Marash district court judge Mnatsakan Martirosyan today convicted opposition activist Gevorg Safaryan of violence against a representative of authorities and sentenced him to 2 years in prison. Speaking to reporters before today’s sentencing, Safaryan had said he had no expectation that he might be acquitted and that he was convinced he was headed straight back to the Nubarashen prison after the final hearing.

Addressing the court and the audience with his final speech, Safaryan again spoke about the contradictions between witnesses’ testimonies, stressing that they had revealed no proof of him having hit police officer Gegham Khachatryan. “The prosecutor thereby violated all legal rules and a person’s right to the presumption of innocence, and asked for a guilty verdict without actually proving my guilt,” the activist stated.

Safaryan also commented on prosecutor Vahe Dolmazyan’s claim that the court could not trust the defense witnesses’ testimonies “because they are the defendant’s friends and are thus biased.” “If that is the case, how can they they believe that the police officers who work under Gegham Khachatryan have given credible testimonies?”

The activist then proceeded to insist that witnesses Pavel Gabrielyan and Artur Hekimyan, namely, had made “obviously made up statements” in court. “In their pre-trial testimonies they had claimed that [on the day of the incident] they had come up to us and wished us a happy New Year. A video recording [from the scene], however, has shown this to be untrue.

“Moreover, all the police officers insist that they had seen Khachatryan’s injured eye, that it had ‘swollen like a balloon and was bleeding.’ The same video, meanwhile, shows Khachatryan walking around the scene uninjured,” Safaryan announced, adding that “Khachatryan should have been placed in the defendant’s chair in stead, because unlike me, he actually inflicted numerous blows on [those gathered at the Freedom Square.”

Safaryan has now been behind bars for overly a year; he was arrested on January 1, 2016, and subsequently charged with assaulting police officer Gegham Khachatryan, after several dozen members of Founding Parliament and New Armenia opposition movements scuffled with police as they tried to celebrate the New Year on Yerevan’s Freedom Square.