The 58-year-old Karen Avanesian is one of a handful of Karabakh Armenians who did not flee to Armenia during Azerbaijan’s September 2023 military offensive that restored Azerbaijani control over the region. Avanesian was arrested by Azerbaijani security services last September for allegedly plotting a “terrorist” attack on Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev. They claimed that he opened fire from an automatic assault rifle and threw hand grenades while approaching the site of an event in Stepanakert attended by Aliyev.
The authorities released what they called video evidence of Avanesian’s preparations for the attack. The footage shot in Stepanakert showed him walking not towards that site but in the opposite direction. Nor did he carry any weapons.
An Azerbaijani court sentenced Avanesian to 16 years in prison on December 25 at the end of what human rights lawyers in Armenia condemned as a sham trial. Citing Karabakh’s former health authorities, they say that he suffers from a serious mental disease and should not have been put on trial in the first place.
Some of those lawyers made this argument in a lawsuit filed with the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). The Strasbourg court responded by demanding documentary evidence of Avanesian’s medical condition.
Avanesian’s medical records were transported to Armenia and handed over to the country’s Health Ministry during the 2023 exodus of Karabakh’s population. Citing privacy grounds, the ministry refused late last year to give the lawyers a copy of those documents.
Over two weeks ago, they also asked a psychiatric clinic in Yerevan to clarify whether it has any documentary information about Avanesian’s health problems.
“We have still not received a reply,” one of the lawyers, Anastasia Makarian, told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service on Tuesday.
Makarian said that the data sought by her and her colleagues could convince the ECHR to demand Avanesian’s release from an Azerbaijani prison.
“If a person has problems with mental health, then their imprisonment is very controversial,” she explained.
Artak Beglarian, a former Karabakh premier also involved in the legal action in Strasbourg, deplored the “criminal inaction” of the Armenian health authorities. He suggested that they are acting unprofessionally, do not care about Avanesian’s fate or simply follow the Armenian government policy of “turning a blind eye to the violation of Artsakh Armenians’ rights by Azerbaijan.”
Beglarian said the lawyers may now have to ask the ECHR to demand such information from the authorities in Yerevan.
“But God knows when that [court order] will come and what this criminal inactivity will lead to,” he said. “Karen Avanesian may, for example, be killed in prison in the meantime.”
The Armenian government has still not officially reacted to the prison sentence given to Avanesian. The office of its representative to the ECHR declined to comment this week on the lawyers’ appeal to the Strasbourg court, saying that it has not been officially notified about the case.
Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian’s administration has also been accused by its domestic critics of doing little to try to ensure the release of at least 23 other Armenian captives held in Azerbaijan. It denies the accusations.