{"id":104417,"date":"2011-06-09T17:27:32","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T12:27:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=104417"},"modified":"2011-06-09T17:28:58","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T12:28:58","slug":"appeals-court-sustains-lower-court-ruling-in-libel-suit-against-local-paper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2011\/06\/09\/appeals-court-sustains-lower-court-ruling-in-libel-suit-against-local-paper.html","title":{"rendered":"Appeals Court Sustains Lower Court Ruling in Libel Suit Against Local Paper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The Court of Appeals today denied an appeal by Dareskizb LLC, publisher of local daily Haykakan Jamanak (&#8220;Armenian Times&#8221;), thereby sustaining a lower court ruling mandating the paper to pay compensation for damages caused through libel and insult to three MPs.<\/p>\n<p>Recall, in February of this year, the Court of General Jurisdiction of Kentron (Center) and Nork Marash Districts of Yerevan <a href=\"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/en\/2011\/02\/07\/local-armenian-paper-charged-with-libel-mandated-to-pay-damages-to-mps.html\">charged<\/a> Haykakan Jamanak to pay 2 million 44 thousand AMD (about $5,600 USD) each to three members of parliament (who are also major businessmen): Ruben Hayrapetyan, Samvel Aleksanyan and Levon Sargsyan.<\/p>\n<p>The three MPs were demanding that the paper not only publish a retraction to a story published on Oct. 14, 2010, titled &#8220;Seven of the Eight are on the List&#8221;, but also pay compensation to the tune of 2.5 million AMD each \u2014 for moral losses and court expenses incurred.<\/p>\n<p>Speaking to Epress.am after court issued its verdict in February, Haykakan Jamanak Managing Editor Hayk Gevorgyan called the ruling the usual round of unlawfulness.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe court is their [the MPs] own court. We didn\u2019t doubt this ruling would happen. For us, nothing unusual has happened. And we are definitely going to appeal this ruling in the Court of Appeals,&#8221; he had said.<\/p>\n<p>The article in question stated that Russian law enforcement agencies had created a list in which different Armenian officials and businessmen were named as being connected to a number of criminal cases and with Russian criminal groups. The three plaintiffs were among those named by the paper.<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Court of Appeals today denied an appeal by Dareskizb LLC, publisher of local daily Haykakan Jamanak&#8230;<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":104356,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[28030,17866,21389,15030,21388],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104417"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104417"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104417\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}