Your trusted source

Armenia’s former President Robert Kocharyan again filed a defamation lawsuit against Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on Tuesday. In the legal claim published on DataLex judicial information system, the ex-president demands “protection of his dignity and honor from public slander.”

At a news conference on Wednesday, Kocharyan's lawyer Hayk Alumyan did not rule out that the defense team may drop the lawsuit if the prime minister retracts his statements, but he did not specify which statements prompted the legal claim.

Kocharyan sued Pashinyan for slander for the first time in September 2018 after the PM’s remarks made in Paris. “What does immunity mean? So what, is it permitted to organize killings and then say, I am immune?” Pashinyan had said.

The suit was withdrawn in June 2019 after the PM’s lawyer clarified that the remarks did not necessarily refer to Kocharyan but rather to the interpretation of the constitutional norm. 

“We may not drop the lawsuit this time, since when we did it last time it probably cleared way for Pashinyan to continue making unbalanced statements on Mr. Kocharyan. We may proceed with the legal claim despite Pashinyan's possible move to withdraw his statements not to face a similar problem in the future,” he said.