Arsen Gevorgyan, 46, was arrested on October 21, on the eve of a tightly contested municipal election and had not been convicted of any crime. His death in detention comes amid Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s widening crackdown.
YEREVAN – Three weeks ago, Arsen Gevorgyan was campaigning on the opposition Strong Armenia ticket to become head of Stepanavan, a community of less than 20,000 people in Armenia’s northern province of Lori.
On October 21, state security forces detained him and thirteen team members, just four days before the election.
On Tuesday morning, the 46-year-old was pronounced dead in Nubarashen prison.
Armenia’s Human Rights Defender Anahit Minasyan, an appointee of the ruling party, pledged to investigate the death as allowed by the scope of her mandate.
“The Human Rights Defender emphasizes that the State bears responsibility for ensuring the rights of persons deprived of their liberty or otherwise under its jurisdiction, including the obligation to protect their right to life and health,” a statement from her office said.
“The State is also obliged to ensure a comprehensive, full and objective investigation of criminal proceedings initiated in connection with deaths,” the statement added.
The Strong Armenia party to which Gevorgyan belonged, whose leader, Samvel Karapetyan, was taken from house arrest to prison six days ago, put the blame squarely on Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.
“The responsibility for the death of yet another opposition figure in prison lies with the individual upon whose orders hundreds of people are being baselessly discredited and imprisoned,” Armenia’s largest opposition party said in a statement.
Gevorgyan is not the first opposition figure to die in state custody in recent years.
On May 14, a man named Armen Hovannisian was arrested for tearing down a ruling party election poster. Two days later, he was dead.
Contrary to Armenian law – which categorizes his act as an administrative offense punishable exclusively by a fine, and only if the posters were placed in designated locations – he was subject to criminal charges and then forcibly committed to a psychiatric facility where he died on May 16, according to officials by suicide.
In June 2022, film producer and critic Armen Grigoryan collapsed and died in court. He had previously warned in a now-recirculating interview that Pashinyan must be removed from power so that more people do not die.
In January 2019, the head of the Armenian Eagles-United Armenia party Mher Yeghiazaryan died following what the authorities said was an “abrupt deterioration of health,” nine days after he had ended a 44-day hunger strike – also in Nubarashen prison.
Opposition MP Lilit Galstyan, who chairs the parliament’s Standing Committee on Human Rights, said the latest death of Gevorgyan was “not simply a tragedy, but part of a broader picture of systematic and systemic repression—for which the authorities bear full responsibility”.
Gevorgyan’s lawyer, Robert Khachatryan, told reporters on Tuesday that, for 20 days, the Anti-Corruption Court had effectively prevented him from appealing his client’s pre-trial detention by withholding the written order.
Khachatryan planned to challenge the pre-trial detention as disproportionate to the non-violent nature of the allegations of bribery.
By law, judge Aram Grigoryan should have handed over the written order immediately, or as soon as possible after issuing the verbal order in court.
Instead, Gevorgyan languished in detention until he died on Tuesday.
Geovrgyan’s death in detention has sparked fresh debate over the widespread, default use of pre-trial detention in Armenia. It has also heightened concerns over the fate of dozens of other political prisoners swept up in Armenia’s ongoing crackdown.
Pashinyan, in the run-up to the June parliamentary elections, vowed to bring his opponents “to their knees” and to “kill” the leading three opposition party leaders, using an Armenian verb reserved for slaughtering animals.
On election night, his Civil Contract party managed to cinch a ruling three-fifths majority following the annulment of the results of three polling stations.
The invalidation of those votes was “decisive” in altering the Armenian parliamentary election results, according to a September 22 report published by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe.
In the wake of that election, Pashinyan’s government has jailed the heads of Armenia’s three largest opposition parties and doubled down on his plans to unseat the head of the Armenian Apostolic Church.
The first political leader to be targeted was Gagik Tsarukyan. He was violently arrested on July 7, just one month after his Prosperous Armenia party was narrowly denied entry into parliament by the annulment of the results from three polling stations.
The next was former President Robert Kocharyan, who heads Armenia Alliance, the second largest opposition bloc in parliament. He was arrested on August 25, along with his eldest son, following a tense exchange between his younger son, lawmaker Levon Kocharyan, and Pashinyan in parliament, over the loss of Artsakh (Nagorno Karabakh).
And on November 4, security forces re-arrested Strong Armenia party leader Samvel Karapetyan.
The billionaire businessman and benefactor inadvertently plunged into the Armenian political fray last year, when he vocally opposed the government’s campaign against the Church.
“A small group, forgetting the history of Armenia, the history of the Armenian Church for thousands of years, have attacked the Armenian Church, [and] the Armenian people. I have always stood with the Armenian Church and the Armenian people.
“If the politicians do not succeed [to defend the Church], then we will engage in our own way,” Karapetyan told a News.am reporter outside the Mother See of Holy Etchmiatzin, the seat of the national church, on 17 June 2025. He was arrested the next day.
While Karapetyan was released to house arrest in January, he is now back to jail following Pashinyan’s vow to force the parliamentary opposition to accept a new constitution demanded by Azerbaijan.
