Unlike three other archbishops and a bishop jailed last year, the six members of the church’s Supreme Spiritual Council were not arrested after being summoned to the Investigative Committee on Saturday. The law-enforcement agency instead banned them from leaving Armenia pending investigation.
They will therefore not be able to attend an emergency conference of the church’s top clergy in Austria. Their lawyers and the church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin believe the accusations levelled against them are aimed at scuttling the conference scheduled for February 16-19.
The accusations stem from Garegin’s January 27 decision to defrock another bishop, who is involved in Pashinian’s controversial campaign to oust the supreme head of the church. The bishop, Gevorg Saroyan, was dismissed earlier in January as head of the church’s Masyatsotn Diocese encompassing parts of Armenia’s southern Ararat province.
With Pashinian’s encouragement, Saroyan refused to obey the decision and went on to challenge it in court. In an unprecedented injunction, a district court ruled on January 16 that Saroyan must be reinstated pending its verdict on the lawsuit.
The Investigative Committee opened the criminal case following Saroyan’s defrocking recommended by the Supreme Spiritual Council. It charged the six bishops sitting on the council as well as another priest with obstructing the execution of a judicial act. They all denied any wrongdoing after leaving a committee building in Yerevan.
“I would not have gone to court because we had made a vow of unconditional obedience to the Patriarch of All Armenians and must keep the vow of obedience,” Bishop Makar Hakobian told journalists.
In a statement issued later on Saturday, the Mothe See strongly condemned “yet another interference by the authorities in the internal affairs of the Church.” It said the accusations and the travel ban are aimed at “disrupting” the upcoming conference of the bishops convened by Garegin.
The gathering was originally scheduled to take place in Echmiadzin from December 10-12. Garegin postponed it because of what his office described as “repressions against clergy.” The Mother See said afterwards that it will be held abroad for the same reason.
Critics say Pashinian wants to prevent the meeting because it would almost certainly demonstrate that the Catholicos continues to enjoy the top clergy’s backing despite a recent revolt by ten archbishops and bishops loyal to the Armenian premier. Saroyan is one of those clergymen.
Garegin’s supporters fear that he too may eventually be arrested and/or indicted. The Investigative Committee’s latest moves increased the likelihood of such a scenario. The defrocking order was issued by the Catholicos, not the advisory Council whose ecclesiastic members are now also prosecuted.
The Mother See and legal experts maintain that Armenian courts have no jurisdiction over the Catholicos’s unlimited authority to replace diocese heads. They argue that Armenian priests serve based on their vows to obey the church’s centuries-old canonical rules, rather than employment contracts. They say the criminal case opened after the pro-government bishop’s defrocking constitutes another blatant violation of the Armenian constitution which guarantees the ancient church’s separation from the state.
Pashinian again denied on Thursday abusing his powers in his drive to oust Garegin. He repeated his demands for the latter’s resignation.
Pashinian began his campaign in late May 2025 right after Garegin accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh, destroying the region’s Armenian churches and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. His detractors say he wants to please Azerbaijan or neutralize a key source of opposition to his unilateral concessions to Armenia’s arch-foe.
Pashinian said until December that Garegin and other top clerics at odds with him must go because they had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy. He has given a different reason for his campaign since then, effectively accusing them of spying for a foreign country, presumably Russia. He has not offered any proof of the allegation publicly dismissed by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on January 20.
In July, Pashinian urged supporters to gear up for a rally in Echmiadzin designed to “free” the seat of the Catholicos. Armenian opposition leaders responded by telling their own supporters to be ready to gather there to defend Garegin.
Some of the pro-government bishops held a gathering outside the Echmiadzin cathedral on December 18. But its participants were greatly outnumbered by thousands of other people who rallied there in support of Garegin.