Pashinyan Chronicles: Documents Issue Sorted, Court Date Postponed

Haykakan Jamanak (“Armenian Times”) chief editor, imprisoned opposition journalist Nikol Pashinyan’s hearing at the Artik penal institution was postponed.

Recall, yesterday’s session was in recess for a few hours. Pashinyan had made a motion to Judge Eva Darbinyan, noting that he had not been allowed to bring the necessary documents with him (which were in his prison cell). The judge granted his request to retrieve his documents; however, in the end, he was not permitted from retrieving his documents and letters, since, according to Artik deputy chief Aghasi Khachatryan, not all of those documents are related to the case.

After all the kerfuffle surrounding Pashinyan’s documents, the attorneys made a motion to delay the session by two days.

The grounds for the motion was that they had to examine all the documents and letters of the defense, an opportunity they hadn’t had previously. Moreover, it was reaching the end of the business day, and, according to the attorneys, yesterday was the deadline for Pashinyan’s documents to be submitted to the European court.

The judge granted the motion, but did not designate the next court date.

Note as well that Pashinyan’s documents were handed over to the attorneys, while the letters and appeals to Haykakan Jamanak and human rights defenders were recorded in the registry, to send to the addressees.

As previously reported, Pashinyan was appealing to overturn a Nov. 19, 2010 ruling in the Aragatsotn Court of First Instance by Judge Suren Mnoyan, who had refused to annul Nubarashen penitentiary chief Tigran Navasardyan’s May 25, 2010 decision, in which he, calculating Nikol Pashinyan’s prison term, added about 5 months, setting it at 3 years, 10 months and 29 days.

Note, Pashinyan, 35, was among several prominent opposition figures who went into hiding in March 2008 following a government crackdown on supporters of former president Levon Ter-Petrossian demanding a re-run of a disputed presidential election. He surrendered to the authorities in July 2009 and was subsequently sentenced to seven years in prison on charges of stirring up “mass disturbances” in Yerevan that left ten people dead.

The oppositionist will have to serve only half of the prison sentence because of a general amnesty declared by the authorities in June 2009. Both he and Ter-Petrossian’s Armenian National Congress consider the case politically motivated.