By Tigran Grigoryan
#DemocracyWatch – Armenia’s newly re-elected government introduced “spiritual security” as a new policy priority, framing reform of the Armenian Apostolic Church as a national security issue. The agenda is included in its draft five-year action plan, published on August 20, and goes as far as envisaging the removal of Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II and the election of a new Church leader.
In this section, the government introduces a new policy agenda under the heading of “spiritual security,” framing the reform of the Armenian Apostolic Church as a matter of national security. It argues that Church reform is necessary to establish a “value-based spiritual life,” bring the Church into conformity with canonical norms, and prevent its politicization and use by external forces as a platform for hybrid warfare.
Most notably, the program explicitly envisages the removal of the Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II, the election of a Catholicos Locum Tenens, the adoption of a new Church charter, and the subsequent election of a new Catholicos.
The inclusion of this agenda raises serious constitutional and democratic concerns. Over the past year, there have already been numerous occasions to discuss the state’s interference in the internal affairs of the Armenian Apostolic Church. We have been monitoring and documenting this process through the Democracy Watch initiative, highlighting its problematic nature and the ways in which it crosses multiple constitutional boundaries and norms of democratic governance.
However, including the removal of the Catholicos in the government’s five-year program takes this process to a new level. This agenda was already included in the ruling party’s pre-election program and raised serious concerns at the time as well. However, while its inclusion in an electoral platform could, with some effort, be interpreted as an element of the ruling party’s electoral calculations and political agenda, its inclusion in the government program effectively elevates the issue to the level of state policy.
This contradicts both the Constitution of the Republic of Armenia and the legislation governing freedom of religion and religious organizations, which clearly define the respective roles of the state and religious institutions. It also contradicts Armenia’s international obligations concerning freedom of religion and the autonomy of religious organizations.
The terminology used is particularly revealing. By introducing the concept of “spiritual security,” the government is framing a fundamentally religious and personal sphere as a matter of national security. This concept is far more characteristic of authoritarian or totalitarian systems than of democratic governance. The concept of spiritual security has been exploited by such regimes, most notably by the Russian government, to undermine civil society and independent media and to suppress dissent by presenting these actors as threats to society’s moral foundations.
In this case, we are not yet dealing with similar practices or with a clearly articulated plan to follow that path. The concept is most likely being used primarily as a framework for incorporating the government’s agenda vis-à-vis the Church into the program. However, the mere introduction and legitimisation of such concepts sends the wrong signals to society about the role and limits of state power and creates fertile ground for the future weaponisation of such notions against people’s rights and liberties.
The state has no legitimate mandate to determine what constitutes society’s “spiritual security.” Spiritual matters are fundamentally personal, and the principle of separation between the state and religious organizations requires clear boundaries on state intervention.
The government’s confrontation with Church leadership is also framed in the language of “hybrid threats.” This has increasingly become a catch-all justification for government intrusion: whenever the government seeks to take measures that would otherwise be difficult to justify within the law, it invokes national sovereignty or hybrid threats to legitimize them.
This is a classic example of the securitization of political processes. By presenting an issue as a threat to national security, the government creates a justification for extraordinary political intervention in an area that would otherwise fall outside the normal scope of state action.
By framing its confrontation with Church leadership as an attempt to prevent the Church from becoming a stronghold for hybrid war by external actors, the government seeks to justify and rationalize the anti-constitutional nature of this process. Yet the actual record does not support this justification. Since the beginning of the active phase of the confrontation between the ruling party and the Church leadership, multiple criminal cases have been initiated against high-ranking clerics and the Catholicos himself. Yet none of these cases is based on accusations of espionage, collaboration with, or ties to foreign governments.
The inclusion of such provisions in the government’s five-year program therefore raises concerns that go beyond the future of the Armenian Apostolic Church. It is another episode in Armenia’s broader process of democratic backsliding.
Moreover, the inclusion of such provisions undermines the credibility and institutional character of the government program itself. Rather than setting out the policies and priorities for governing the state, the document incorporates a specific domestic political agenda of the ruling party, including an explicit roadmap for removing a religious leader, blurring the line between the government’s responsibilities and the partisan interests of the ruling political force.
Democracy Watch is a joint initiative of CivilNet and the Regional Center for Democracy and Security.