Epress.am News from Armenia
Arayik Papikyan, a lawyer with the Yerevan-based Helsinki Association for Human Rights (HAHR) who has been defending the rights of several members of the Sasna Tsrer armed group, is being threatened and harassed for carrying out his professional duties, HAHR reports.
“It is a long time the Helsinki Association has been voicing that the organization’s lawyers have been subjected to harassment in the performance of their professional duties. It has mainly been carried on by courts and law enforcement agencies. Unfortunately, this has become usual.
“The atmosphere of impunity formed around this vicious and condemnable phenomenon has resulted in the fact that one of the lawyers has also been subjected to personal threats and persecutions.
“Arayik Papikyan has been receiving e-mails, in which not only he is being threatened to abstain from performing his professional activities, but also his family members are subjected to threatening,” the human rights organizations said in a statement on Monday, adding that “the crime has already been reported to the RA Special Investigation Service.”