Author: Ani Basmajian

Pashinyan, a former journalist, is overseeing new restrictions on journalists. (primeminister.am)

“Armenia is a bastion of democracy” has become a catchphrase for the government that has ruled since 2018. But international watchdogs are alarmed as the authorities increasingly threaten the country’s freedom of speech.

These efforts have accelerated over the past year, following Armenia’s loss in the war with Azerbaijan and increasing political pressure against the ruling party and Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.

On October 9, the Constitutional Court upheld a new law passed this year that substantially raised the penalties for insults aimed at individuals for their “public activities.” The maximum fine for the offense is about $12,600, or on the order of 30 times the usual monthly salary of a journalist in Armenia.

Critics say the law was designed to protect government officials, and in at least two cases since the beginning of September at least three Armenians have been charged with violating the law for insulting Pashinyan on Facebook. 

So far, no journalists have been charged under the new law, but press freedom advocates are concerned about a chilling effect.

The new law represents “a huge step back for freedom of _expression_ in Armenia and a serious threat for press freedom," said Jeanne Cavelier of international press watchdog Reporters Without Borders. Cavalier told Eurasianet that the Constitutional Court decision was "very disappointing" and said the law could "seriously deter and intimidate the press.”

Undeterred, the government appears to be pressing ahead with more restrictions. On October 19, a member of parliament from the ruling Civil Contract party, Artur Hovhannisyan, proposed amendments to the Law on Mass Media that would effectively ban the use of unidentified sources. 

The revisions alter media law in several ways, including adding requirements for media outlets to submit financial reports and to disclose their ownership. But the most attention has been paid to the amendment that would make media outlets liable for slander if they cite an unidentified source who is deemed to have defamed or insulted someone. 

“It is clear that a journalist is not obliged to reveal an anonymous source, but this does not mean that when a journalist does not reveal an anonymous source, the journalist is exempt from liability,” Minister of Justice Karen Adreasyan said at a parliament session discussing the law.

In fact, under Armenian law a court can only force a journalist to disclose a source in the case that the information is needed to solve a serious crime. Even in those cases, the European Court of Human Rights typically rules in favor of the journalist being allowed to maintain the secrecy of a source. 

To many observers, it appears that the law was particularly aimed at the anonymous Telegram news channels that have proliferated in Armenia in recent years. Many of them specialize in news about politics, military, and foreign policy – usually with an anti-government perspective – and their scoops are often reprinted in more traditional online media. One channel that has particularly gotten under the skin of the authorities is Mediaport, formed after the end of last year’s war with Azerbaijan and which frequently leaks information – sometimes accurate, sometimes not, but nearly all critical of the government – to its 26,000 subscribers.

Media and press advocacy groups in Armenia complain that they were only perfunctorily consulted about the law. 

"The parliament invited NGOs to discuss it, but nobody approved of the initiative," media expert Artur Papyan told Eurasianet. Papyan hosts a program on the news website CivilNet devoted to disinformation and fact-checking, and wonders how the law will affect his work. "Can I keep doing my program, or will I be dragged to court?" 

While the law appears to be targeting Telegram channels, “it is clear that tools to control the media are being created to be used selectively, targeting only certain media outlets," Papyan said.  

Lawsuits “drastically increased”

Even before these new laws were introduced, there had been signs of a growing crackdown on freedom of speech. The Armenian media rights group Committee to Protect Freedom of _expression_ registered 10 legal cases filed against media and journalists in the first quarter of 2021, and 23 in the second quarter. Of those cases, 12 were filed by a single person and companies associated with him: Khachatur Sukiasyan, a businessman and recently elected member of parliament from Civil Contract, the ruling party.

"Even without the [new] restrictive legal measures, the flow of lawsuits against media and journalists drastically increased during the second quarter,” the organization wrote in a July report. 

Meanwhile, government officials – led by Pashinyan himself – have tried to turn their supporters against the press by using inflammatory rhetoric. "At the same time, whereas this worrying evolution of laws and restrictions shows a lack of tolerance to criticism from the Armenian authorities, we observe that representatives of the government sometimes use violent rhetoric to speak about journalists,” Cavalier said. 

Pashinyan has called journalists “killers” and said the media space in Armenia is a “garbage dump,” Cavalier recalled. “And Pashinyan himself used to be an editor in chief [of a newspaper]!” she added. (He used to head the newspaper Armenian Times, which is now run by his wife, Anna Hakobyan.) “This hostile speech only fuels the climate of impunity for violence and crimes against journalists.”

The crackdown on free speech is the result of the government’s “paranoia,” said media analyst Samvel Martirosyan. "The government is weak and the majority of media is not under their control,” he told Eurasianet. 

Every successive government in Armenia has tried to do something about negative media coverage. "They don't think that criticism represents public sentiment, it’s very typical for all our governments to lose touch with reality and see every criticism as biased and paid-for," Martirosyan said.

Unlike the previous regime, which was better able to directly manage media coverage, the new government uses different tools, Martirosyan said.

“The president's office doesn't make calls to television stations, so they need laws to control information," he said. The former authorities “had an old-fashioned approach to media,” he added. “They prioritized the control of television. The current government came to power via the internet and they overprioritize the internet, giving everything there a significance that sometimes doesn’t reflect reality.”

In its Freedom on the Net report, released last month, the U.S-based human rights organization Freedom House registered a drop in Armenia’s internet freedom, from 75 out of 100 in 2020 to 71 in 2021.

 

Azerbaijan’s relations with Iran, its large neighbor to the south, have been in flux since the end of last year’s war with Armenia. The most recent rocky period started when Azerbaijan began charging fees to Iranian trucks on a road through southern Armenia that passes through slices of Azerbaijani territory in some places.

At first, Iran remained silent even after Azerbaijani police and customs confirmed the practice. Armenian media reported that some of the trucks targeted had been “transporting cement to Yerevan and Stepanakert,” the de facto capital of Nagorno-Karabakh. The territory is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani but had been controlled by Armenian forces since the first war between the two sides in the 1990s.

The drivers had been detained because they “entered Azerbaijan illegally from Armenia and relevant measures will be taken,” spokesperson of the Ministry of Interior Affairs of Azerbaijan Ehsan Zahidov confirmed the following day. Azerbaijan has long held that entry into Karabakh via Armenia amounts to an illegal border crossing.

Iran’s foreign ministry responded by demanding the release of the drivers and to meet with Azerbaijani officials to resolve the issue.

A series of meetings have taken place since then but the fate of the drivers is still unknown.

Iran’s ambassador to Azerbaijan, Abbas Mousavi, met with Hikmet Hajiyev, the senior foreign policy adviser to Azerbaijan President Ilham Aliyev, twice in a week. In a tweet, Mousavi said the two “reviewed the current situation and the future of our good relations and other issues of interest.”

On September 23, Azerbaijan’s Foreign Minister Jeyhun Bayramov met with his Iranian counterpart Hossein Amir-Abdollahian on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly. In a statement, the Azerbaijani MFA noted that the ministers reviewed the “current situation in the region.” Amir-Abdollahian, in his own comments, alluded to “third parties” coming between Iran and Azerbaijan, which in Iran was interpreted as a reference to Israel, Iran’s archenemy, which has a warm relationship with Baku.

Tension has been exacerbated by naval military exercises conducted jointly by Turkey and Azerbaijan in the Caspian Sea. Iran’s foreign ministry said that the drills violated an international convention banning foreign military forces from the sea. (Azerbaijani analysts retorted that Iran is the only Caspian littoral country not to have ratified the convention.) Iran then held its own military drills close to its border with Azerbaijan.

Meanwhile, in Iran a variety of officials have been heaping abuse on Azerbaijan. One Iranian member of parliament, Ahmad Naderi said on Twitter that Azerbaijani officials have “gotten carried away” and have been making statements that are “bigger than their size and capacity,” the Tehran Times reported. 

Another MP, Mohammad Reza Ahmadi Sangari, said that Baku had become arrogant because of its military victory over Armenia, which he said was the result of “Turkish doping,” referring to Ankara’s heavy support of Azerbaijan. “The age of your small country is less than that of our youngest lawmaker,” Sangari added.

In Baku, however, analysts say the government appears to be motivated by long-running irritation at Iranian trucks supplying Nagorno-Karabakh.

Following Azerbaijan’s gaining control of some stretches of the road, which connects the key southern Armenian cities of Goris and Kapan and which is Armenia’s only highway to Iran, Baku has been able to act on those Iranian deliveries.

The war also resulted in Azerbaijan regaining territory very close to the Lachin corridor, the road that connects Armenia to Nagorno-Karabakh. That has allowed Azerbaijan to surveil the road for what it sees as illegal border crossings. President Aliyev, in a September 27 interview with Turkish media, said that in the period between August 11 and September 11 Baku had counted 60 Iranian trucks using the road. Some of them, he said, appeared to be trying to hide their identity by using Armenian license plates.

He also said Iranian officials had repeatedly refused to act. "The first time [the Azerbaijani side issued] a verbal warning, the second, an official note, and the third, posts – customs, border, police. In this way we have begun to control the road through Azerbaijani territory," Aliyev said. As a result, he said, the number of Iranian trucks passing through Lachin has "dropped to zero."

While much of the Azerbaijani media coverage of the spat has emphasized a widespread belief that Iran is on Armenia’s side in the conflict, that is a misunderstanding, said political analyst Eldar Mamedov.

Iran has in fact “repeatedly supported Azerbaijan’s territorial integrity on the level of political and religious leadership,” Mamedov told Eurasianet

“When people in Baku accuse Iran of a pro-Armenian stance, they need to be reminded of the big picture: for example, Baku's close relationship with Israel, or the persistence of the idea of ‘southern Azerbaijan’ that supposedly has to be "liberated" from Iran,” said Mamedov, referring to the northern part of Iran that is largely populated by ethnic Azerbaijanis.

As for the most recent tensions between the two countries, Mamedov suggests they will not fundamentally change the relationship.

“Iran is treading carefully in the Caucasus,” he said. “It does not need destabilization of the northern border, in addition to all the challenges it already has in other scenarios like the Persian Gulf, Iraq, and Afghanistan.”