The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) has ruled that Armenia violated the rights of victims of a deadly crackdown on a post-election protest on 1 March 2008. The protests took place following the 2008 elections, in which the opposition insisted that the election results were rigged. In the ensuing crackdown, ten people were killed, including two police officers.
On Thursday, the ECHR ordered the Armenian authorities to pay €30,000 ($35,000) to each applicant in the case and €35,000 ($41,000) to all applicants together, for court costs and expenses, within three months after the judgment becomes final.
The court decided to join all the nine appeals regarding the deadly events into one case. With the exception of Samvel Harutyunyan and Zakar Hovhannisyan, two of those killed in the crackdown, the court agreed unanimously that the state’s actions resulted in a breach of the right to life.
In the case of Harutyunyan, the court noted that based on the submitted information alone, the evidence was ‘insufficient’ to conclude that he was killed by a Cheremukha-7 tear-gas grenade fired by the police, as was alleged.
The court took a similar approach in regards to the case of Hovhannisyan, arguing that there was ‘insufficient evidence’.
For the case of the other victims, regarding which the court appeal was submitted, the court ruled that the ‘lethal force used [...] was not “absolutely necessary” and their deaths resulted from a badly planned and executed operation involving the improper use of crowd-control weapons and the indiscriminate and disproportionate use of lethal force’.
The ECHR also ruled that the Armenian government ‘fell short of their obligations [...] to submit copies of the documents requested in respect of the events of 1 March 2008’.
The deadly protests erupted in February 2008 after Serzh Sargsyan, an ally of then-president Robert Kocharyan, was declared the winner in contested presidential elections.
The opposition, led by Levon Ter-Petrosyan, who had previously served as president (1991–1998), as well as current Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, insisted the election results were rigged.
Pashinyan himself was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2010 for organising ‘violent’ rallies in 2008, but was released in 2011 under a general amnesty.
After Pashinyan came to power as a result of the Velvet Revolution in 2018, the authorities reopened the case of violent protests.
Kocharyan and other former officials were placed on trial for their alleged role in the violent crackdown, which made headlines in Armenia. However, he and others were acquitted of the charges in March 2021 after Armenia’s Constitutional Court declared that it was unconstitutional to charge the former officials with ‘overthrowing the constitutional order’.
The court’s decision was then overturned in September 2024 and sent to the Anti-Corruption Court for a new examination.
In November 2024, the prosecutors proposed to charge Kocharyan and others for exceeding official authority and abusing influence.
In August, the Prosecutor General’s Office filed its motion with the Anti-Corruption Court seeking to confiscate ֏670 million ($1.7 million) in compensation paid to the victims in 2019 under Pashinyan’s term, from Kocharyan and other former high-ranking officials who held office during the events.
Arshaluys Barseghyan
