Arrest, No Basis, Release: The Pashinyan Pattern
Arrest someone with no basis. Hold them for months. Then a court calls it baseless.
The hosts close the episode with their corruptions and persecutions segment and the case of Alen Ghevondyan, an Opposition analyst arrested in June, before the 2026 parliamentary elections. Asbed lays out the charge: making public calls on Facebook to seize power and forcibly overthrow the constitutional order. He points out the absurdity plainly. This is a common citizen, not armed, not a terrorist, somehow accused of being able to topple an entire country’s constitutional order. Three months later, a judge dismissed the case.
Hovik frames the outcome as proof of a repeating method. Under the Pashinyan regime, he says, someone is arrested without any basis, held for two or three months, and then released, or kept in detention through several more cycles. The point is not conviction. It is pressure: keeping opposition figures and critics occupied and afraid, while the arrest itself feeds propaganda that the opposition is trying to overthrow the government. When the court later rules the accusation baseless, that reversal barely registers against the earlier headlines.
The segment ties Ghevondyan’s case to the broader picture of political prisoners in Armenia, alongside the extended pretrial detention of Gagik Tsarukyan mentioned just before. Asbed closes on Pashinyan’s own logic: if you don’t like us, overthrow us, but if you try, you go to jail for no reason and come out with nothing. The exchange captures a recurring theme, that broad national-security charges and pretrial detention function less as justice than as tools to manage dissent ahead of a contested vote.
Transcript
Asbed Bedrossian: This is an Artsakh analyst, and he was arrested back in June
Hovik Manucharyan: Before the elections.
Asbed Bedrossian: before the elections, probably because Pashinyan did not like his Facebook posts or something like that. The actual charge is he made public calls on his Facebook account to seize power and forcibly overthrow the constitutional order. This is a common citizen. He's not armed. He's not a terrorist. And he can somehow overthrow the constitutional order of the entire country. So I think they just tried to shut him up and threw him in jail. Three months later, a judge has basically dismissed the case.
Hovik Manucharyan: That's essentially the proof, and that is a pattern that the Pashinyan regime repeats over and over. They arrest someone without any basis, and then two months later, three months later, they might release him, they might keep him in detention for three more cycles. It's just a way to put pressure on the opposition and keep them occupied.
Asbed Bedrossian: Yeah, yeah.
Hovik Manucharyan: and they use this as propaganda right they used also they use this as propaganda saying see the opposition is trying to overthrow us it was all over the media and now like the court basically ruled it as baseless