A law-enforcement agency banned Garegin as well as six bishops from leaving Armenia when it indicted them two months ago. The accusations levelled against them stem from Garegin’s January 27 decision to defrock another bishop, who is involved in Pashinian’s controversial campaign.
They were thus unable to attend an emergency episcopal conference held by the Armenian Church in Austria later in February. Garegin was also not allowed to attend last month the funeral of neighboring Georgia’s longtime Catholicos-Patriarch Ilia II.
Garegin’s office and legal experts questioned the legality of the accusations, saying that Armenian law-enforcement authorities have no jurisdiction over internal church affairs. Lawyers representing the Catholicos challenged the travel ban in court.
A court of first instance declared the ban null and void late last week. The Office of the Prosecutor-General told the Sputnik news agency on Monday that it will appeal against the court order.
Pashinian began pressuring Garegin to resign last June shortly after the Catholicos accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. Three Armenian archbishops and one bishop were arrested in the following months on different charges strongly denied by them. Three of them were moved to house arrest earlier this year.
Pashinian has used different lines of attack on the church during his nearly yearlong campaign. He 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 then began accusing them of spying for a foreign country, presumably Russia. He has still not offered any proof of the allegations.
Early this month, Pashinian’s Civil Contract party added a pledge to oust Garegin to its campaign manifesto for the Armenian parliamentary elections slated for June 7. The church’s Mother See in Echmiadzin condemned the “unlawful” move.
“The election of the Catholicos and any changes in Church life fall exclusively within the spiritual-canonical sphere and are therefore beyond the competence of political parties and state authorities,” it said in an April 9 statement.
Armenian opposition figures and other critics also maintain that Pashinian’s drive to oust Garegin violates Armenia’s constitution guaranteeing the church’s separation from the state. Two Western religious rights groups echoed these claims in February. One of them, the Vienna-based the Forum for Religious Freedom Europe, spoke of “grave threats to freedom of religion or belief” in Armenia.