State Interference and the Erosion of Religious Freedom and Autonomy in Armenia

09.12.2025

By Tigran Grigoryan


Armenia’s domestic political life continues to be dominated by the ruling party’s confrontation with the Church leadership. In its attempt to dethrone Catholicos Garegin II, Prime Minister Pashinyan has adopted a two-fold approach in recent months. On the one hand, he has sought to create cleavages within the Church by finding loyalists willing either to speak out publicly against the Catholicos or to defy his authority by serving liturgies attended by the prime minister. The second element of this approach is the instrumentalization of law-enforcement bodies against Church figures who publicly oppose the prime minister’s policies, as well as the direct intervention of security agencies in the internal procedures and functioning of the Armenian Apostolic Church.

This double-edged strategy was fully on display in the past week. For Pashinyan, one way of undermining the Catholicos’s authority has been his attendance at Sunday liturgies in various monasteries and churches, accompanied by officials and loyalists from across the country. During these liturgies, priests are required not to mention Garegin II’s name, despite this being mandated by Church canon. The latest such liturgy took place in Gyumri, and ahead of the Prime Minister’s visit, special services were reportedly involved. Father Ruben Gasparyan told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service that he had been asked to participate in the liturgy attended by Pashinyan and that various actors, including the National Security Service (NSS), urged him not to mention the Catholicos’s name–an instruction he refused to follow.

Pashinyan later confirmed the NSS’s involvement, noting that he only attends liturgies where the Catholicos’s name is not mentioned.

It is also noteworthy that before the liturgy at Gyumri’s Seven Wounds Church–attended by Pashinyan on Sunday–law-enforcement agencies sealed the church and placed it under full control. Since all clergy of the Shirak Eparchy refused to serve the mass without mentioning the Catholicos’s name, a priest from the Armavir Eparchy was invited to conduct it. This, too, was characterized as a violation of the Church’s internal rules.

Further indications of state interference emerged when Pashinyan posted on Facebook that, before liturgies, Armenia’s national anthem should be played and the national flag displayed in front of churches. He subsequently published a roadmap for reforming the Armenian Apostolic Church, which includes the resignation of the Catholicos, the election of an interim leader, and the adoption of a new Canon Law book, among other steps.

All of this represents a clear violation of the religious freedom and autonomy of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Even more concerning is the involvement of security services and law-enforcement agencies–practices strongly reminiscent of the Soviet era. It also directly contradicts Pashinyan’s earlier claims that he was demanding the Catholicos’s resignation merely as an “ordinary believer.” The events of recent months have demonstrated the opposite, and this argument is no longer invoked. The National Security Service does not attempt to change the content of a liturgy on behalf of ordinary believers.

As noted above, beyond intervening in the Church’s internal procedures, law-enforcement bodies are also being used to target some of the government’s most outspoken critics within the Church. This trend continued in recent days, when Archbishop Arshak Khachatryan was summoned to the National Security Service and charged with allegedly planting narcotics in the bag of a protester who demonstrated against the Catholicos in 2018, purportedly to discredit him. He has been detained for two months. He is now the fourth high-ranking clergyman of the Armenian Apostolic Church to be taken into custody.

Archbishop Khachatryan had previously been at the center of a sex scandal after intimate videos allegedly featuring him were leaked by a Telegram channel and disseminated by pro-government media. Despite this, he continued to vocally oppose Pashinyan’s statements and actions regarding the Church leadership and ruled out the possibility of the Catholicos’s resignation.

Opening a criminal case led by the National Security Service over an offense allegedly committed seven years ago fits squarely within the logic of the government’s ongoing confrontation with the Church leadership. As noted in earlier Democracy Watch reports, the ongoing instrumentalization of law-enforcement bodies and the judiciary for domestic political purposes, along with the application of selective justice, will leave a lasting mark on Armenia’s prospects for establishing a system in which the rule of law and the separation of powers are truly unalterable.

Democracy Watch is a joint initiative by CivilNet and the Regional Center for Democracy and Security, a Yerevan-based think tank.

This material has been funded by UK International Development from the UK government; however, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect the UK government’s official policies.