Artur Osipyan, a refugee from the Azerbaijan-annexed region of Nagorno-Karabakh, last month publicly confronted Armenia’s prime minister Nikol Pashinyan. Osipyan was subsequently arrested.
Osipyan had accused Pashinyan, who was on his election campaign trail, of perpetuating Azerbaijani narratives and of destroying his homeland.
Alluding to Azerbaijan’s 2023 military operation on Nagorno-Karabakh that forced 100,000 ethnic Armenians into displacement, Pashinyan reportedly responded: “You should have gone and died in place of our children…why are you alive?”
Osipyan was arrested for hooliganism and election campaign obstruction.
Politically-motivated arrests and hate speech have increasingly emerged out of Yerevan in the wake of national elections set to be held on 7 June.
