Yerevan Mayor Loses Third Court Case Against Saghatelyan

Horizon Weekly – Yerevan Mayor Tigran Avinyan has suffered a third defeat in a series of legal actions brought against opposition parliamentarian and ARF Armenia leader, Ishkhan Saghatelyan. According to Saghatelyan’s lawyer, Vahe Grigoryan, the Court of Cassation has declined to hear the Municipality’s most recent appeal, leaving a lower court decision intact and final.

Grigoryan noted that Avinyan initiated four separate cases in an effort to impose fines of up to 300,000 drams each, amounting to 1.2 million drams, over Saghatelyan’s involvement in peaceful demonstrations and protests in 2022. All four claims were previously rejected by the Administrative Court.

The Municipality appealed those decisions, but after losing three cases at the Administrative Court of Appeals, it attempted to take the matter to the Court of Cassation. In this latest instance, however, the court ruled that the Municipality did not have the procedural standing required to file such an appeal, which can only be submitted by the mayor personally. The fourth case remains pending.

The repeated courtroom setbacks also highlight a broader pattern: the steady use of administrative and legal tools to scrutinize and pressure opposition figures. While presented as routine legal disputes, such cases increasingly reflect a climate in which political dissent frequently intersects with institutional leverage, raising questions about the boundaries between governance and the management of critics.