Gyumri-based Archbishop Mikael Ajapahian was taken into custody in June 2025 the day after Pashinian threatened to forcibly remove the supreme head of the Armenian Apostolic Church from his Echmiadzin headquarters. He was charged with calling for a violent overthrow of the Armenian government.
Ajapahian, who heads the church diocese in Armenia’s Shirak province, rejected the accusation as politically motivated during his unusually quick trial in Yerevan which ended in October in a two-year prison sentence. The Court of Appeals overturned the verdict, freed Ajapahian from house arrest but stopped short of formally acquitting him in June this year. It backed defense lawyers’ claims that under Armenian law he should have been tried by a court in Gyumri.
Prosecutor-General Anna Vardapetian appealed to the higher Court of Cassation this week to strike down that decision. Ajapahian, who was moved to house arrest in February, will stand fresh trial in Gyumri if the court rejects the appeal.
Ajapahian’s lawyer, Roman Aharonian, insisted on Friday that the 63-year-old cleric should have been tried in his hometown because he made his alleged call for violent regime change there. Aharonian said law-enforcement authorities deliberately moved the trial to Yerevan because they realized that Ajapahian is widely respected in Shirak and that a local court may not dare to jail him.
A trial prosecutor claimed earlier that investigators could not determine where Ajapahian made his statement because it was reported by multiple national media outlets. The case against Ajapahian is based on a June 2025 interview in which he lamented the Armenian military’s failure to topple Pashinian and thus “save” Armenia and Nagorno-Karabakh following the 2020 war with Azerbaijan.
Two other archbishops and a bishop loyal to Garegin were also arrested last year on different charges strongly denied by them. Like Ajapahian, they were subsequently moved to house arrest.
In January, the authorities also indicted six other bishops and Garegin himself but refrained from arresting them. They went on trial last week. The presiding judge recused himself from the case during the first court hearing.