Ruling Civil Contract party MP Artur Hovhannisyan and opposition I Have Honour faction MP Taguhi Tovmasyan have been involved in a heated confrontation, calling on each other to take drug and STI tests.
The conflict began on 4 September, when Hovhannisyan, while passing by, interrupted Tovmasyan’s press briefing in parliament, urging journalists to ask her why she had been absent from parliamentary sessions.
On Monday, following Hovhannisyan’s remark, Tovmasyan submitted a letter to Parliamentary Speaker Alen Simonyan. Referring to the interruption incident, Tovmasyan stated that Hovhannisyan’s behaviour raised suspicions and demanded Hovhannisyan to ‘be tested for drug use every day before entering the [parliament], and that the results be made public’.
Tovmasyan justified her proposal by referring to a 2017 incident, during which Hovhannisyan was detained by the police and ‘0.24 grams [of] a yellow-green substance was discovered in his car’, leading to the launch of a criminal investigation.
When asked about Tovmasyan's letter on Monday, Hovhannisyan, during a press briefing, suggested that Tovmasyan undergo STI tests.
‘You are all journalists, you don't have three or four houses on Northern Avenue [a central street in Yerevan] and so on, do you? Let her take an STI test every day so that we can understand where those four houses came from’, Hovhannisyan said.
Commenting on the drug case, Hovhannisyan suggested that the authorities at the time had made a failed attempt to initiate a criminal case against him while he was working as an ‘opposition journalist’.
‘No circumstances or grounds have emerged, and now people are trying to defame me with that [incident]’, Hovhannisyan said, assuring that he was not opposed to taking a drug test, but would do so under public demand.
Both MPs involved in the conflict were journalists before becoming politicians in post-revolutionary Armenia in 2019. They initially joined the same My Step alliance, however Tovmasyan left the ruling faction immediately after the Armenian defeat in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War in 2020.
In the following elections in 2021, she became an MP from the I Have Honour faction, consisting of the former ruling Republican Party and other parties.
The Zhoghovurd (People) daily, founded by Tovmasyan, covered Hovhannisyan's drug case, which occurred six years prior in 2023.
In response to the inquiry from the media outlet, the Investigative Committee stated that ‘no person was held criminally liable in the criminal case’, and as a result of the investigation, in January 2018, ‘a decision was made to dismiss the criminal case due to the lack of a criminal offence in the act’.
Tovmasyan’s media outlet commented on the authorities’ responses, noting that the reason for closing the case remained unclear.
Tovmasyan urges Hovhannisyan’s mother to get involved
The heated discussion continued online Monday evening.
In response to Hovhannisyan’s comments about the STI test, Tovmasyan posted on Facebook urging Hovhannisyan’s mother to ‘explain’ to her son that using such language about a woman is 'unacceptable.'
Meanwhile, Tovmasyan vowed to file lawsuits over the statements, denying ownership of four houses in downtown Yerevan and clarifying that what she owns was purchased ‘with a mortgage decades ago’.
According to her declaration, Tovmasyan owns three apartments in Yerevan, which she obtained between 2012 and 2019, and one plot of land in the Gegharkunik region, which she inherited.
In turn, Hovhannisyan addressed Tovmasyan’s ‘political father’, Serzh Sargsyan, Armenia’s third president, and ‘political aunt’, Artur Vanetsyan, the former head of the National Security Service under Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, who was later dismissed and elected as an MP from the opposition I Have Honour faction before resigning in 2022.
‘Gentlemen, urge or order your personal MP to behave in a manner worthy of an Armenian woman and an MP — not to spread immoral lies and then hide behind the image of a woman’, Hovhannisyan wrote.
In an interview with RFE/RL on Wednesday, Tovmasyan insisted that Hovhannisyan should resign. Following this, Hovhannisyan targeted RFE/RL attempting to discredit it by comparing it to media outlets aligned with opposition forces, claiming it 'only differs by the logo’.
‘Reinforcement of stereotypes’ and sexism
The heated discussion has been condemned by civil right advocates, who pointed out that it enforces stigmas regarding vulnerable groups.
On Tuesday, the Women’s Resource Centre noted that Hovhannisyan’s remarks were sexist, adding that women’s morality ‘is often misused for political purposes’. However, they stressed that they did not justify Tovmasyan’s public demand for Hovhannisyan to take a drug test.
‘The issue of women’s morality is often misused for political purposes, and this is unacceptable. Such a political climate continues to serve patriarchal gender norms, the main purpose of which is to silence women and other systematically ignored voices’, read the statement.
Aside from sexism and discrimination, civil rights activist and OC Media contributor Andranik Shirinyan has also criticised the politicians for calling on each other to undergo STI and drug tests.
‘Such talk reinforces the stereotype that sexually transmitted infections can only occur from having multiple partners or from extramarital affairs, while in Armenia, women living with HIV are largely infected by their husbands’, wrote Shirinyan.
He further noted that ‘the regular targeting of drug users by politicians is not welcome’.
Members of the ruling faction, including Simonyan, while not directly condemning Hovhannisyan’s behavior publicly, appeared to deem it unacceptable.
On Thursday, Simonyan stated in a press briefing that he didn’t believe drug or STI tests or the heated quarrel between the two MPs was ‘the right way to work’.
