{"id":265025,"date":"2015-05-15T11:24:48","date_gmt":"2015-05-15T07:24:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.epress.am\/?p=265025"},"modified":"2015-05-15T11:34:30","modified_gmt":"2015-05-15T07:34:30","slug":"armenian-court-rules-against-hate-spreading-newspaper-obliges-to-pay-compensation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/2015\/05\/15\/armenian-court-rules-against-hate-spreading-newspaper-obliges-to-pay-compensation.html","title":{"rendered":"Armenian Court Rules Against Hate-Spreading Newspaper, Obliges to Pay Compensation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tOn Thursday, May 14, the Court of General Jurisdiction of Kentron and Nork-Marash Administrative Districts of Yerevan partially satisfied the claim by “Nor Serund” (“New Generation”) NGO representatives Grigor Gevorgyan, Arman Sahakyan, and Hovhannes Mkrtchyan against “Iravunk” newspaper and its editor-in-chief Hovhannes Galajyan. The plaintiffs demanded that the paper publish a refutation, publish the court's verdict, and pay compensation for moral damages to each citizen in the amount of 3 million AMD (about $ 7,000).<\/span>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tPresiding judge Arayik Melkumyan did not satisfy the demand to publish the verdict, and set the amount of compensation 250.000 AMD (about $ 526) to each plaintiff, Arman Sahakyan told Epress.am. He added he was pleasantly surprised: he did not expect such a verdict against "Iravunk" paper. \n<\/p>\n

\n\tRecall, on July 11, 2014 “Iravunk” newspaper published an article in the section “Obscenity without limits” entitled “Another three of Conchita’s witnesses joined the persecution of free speech<\/span><\/a>”, where details of personal lives of Arman Sahakyan, Hovhannes Mkrtchyan, and Grigor Gevorgyan were published. \n<\/p>\n

\n\tPreviously, the Court of First Instance<\/span><\/a> and the Court of Appeal<\/span><\/a> rejected another lawsuit against  "Iravunk" newspaper, submitted by 16 citizens.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn May, 2014, the paper published an article entitled “They serve the interests of international homo-addiction [sic] lobbying: the blacklist of the country’s and nation’s enemies”, which included a black list of 60 individuals' names, calling for people to show “zero tolerance” towards them, deny employment, fire them from civil service jobs, and not greet them on meeting.\n<\/p>\n

\n\t"Iravunk" referred to those people, who during a Facebook Press Conference organized by RFE\/RL's Armenian Service had criticized 2014 Eurovision’s Armenian national jury members and singers Inga and Anush Arshakyan for uttering their “disgust” toward Austrian singer Conchita Wurst. \n<\/p>\n

\n\t16 of the 60 people collectively submitted a suit to the court, claiming their honor and dignity were sullied, however the court considered the claim insufficient, and ordered the plaintiffs to compensate the paper's editor-in-chief Hovhannes Galajyan's legal costs.\n<\/p>\n

\n\tPictured, Hovhannes Galajyan and Republican Party MP, founder and chairman of "Iravunk Media" LLC Hayk Babukhanyan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The plaintiffs demanded that the paper publish a refutation, publish the court’s verdict, and pay compensation for moral damages to each citizen in the amount of 3 million AMD (about $ 7,000)…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":259268,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tstyn_error":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[54250,20234,58102,28774,16144,61226],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265025"}],"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=265025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/259268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/epress.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}