In a lawsuit revealed on Wednesday, the Office of the Prosecutor-General asked a Yerevan court to invalidate the Karabakh government’s ownership of the building formalized in 2017. The law-enforcement agency declined to specify the grounds on which it is seeking such a ruling.
Court hearings on the lawsuit have yet to start. Artak Beglarian, a former Karabakh premier, predicted that the judge in the case will likely agree to evict the Karabakh Armenian leadership from the building that has for decades served as its office in Armenia. He claimed that Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian is seeking to seize it at the behest of Azerbaijan’s President Ilham Aliyev.
“Aliyev is destroying the buildings of Artsakh state bodies in Stepanakert,” Beglarian told RFE/RL’s Armenian Service. “Now Pashinian's government wants to take the only building of Artsakh state institutes in Yerevan from us.”
Beglarian also described the court action as Pashinian’s act of “revenge” against the Karabakh leadership that has been increasingly critical of his appeasement policy towards Azerbaijan.
In March 2024, Pashinian lambasted Karabakh’s Yerevan-based leaders for continuing to present themselves as a government in exile and threatened to crack down on them. Pashinian renewed his threats in June 2024 as he accused them of encouraging Karabakh Armenian refugees to participate in antigovernment protests in the Armenian capital. The leaders of Karabakh’s main political groups responded by accusing him of unleashing repressions and waging a smear campaign against the Karabakh Armenians.
“I have made clear that I cannot allow there to be a second state within the Republic of Armenia,” Pashinian told reporters on Wednesday. “The state should take measures.”
Pashinian publicly recognized Azerbaijani sovereignty over Karabakh even before the September 2023 offensive that restored Baku’s full control of the territory and forced its ethnic Armenian population to flee to Armenia. He has repeatedly indicated that the Karabakh issue is closed for his administration.
Pashinian’s critics say he is now trying to dismantle all Karabakh bodies in order to woo Baku and convince it to sign an Armenian-Azerbaijani peace treaty which he would use for trying to cling to power.
Samvel Shahramanian, who served until last month as Karabakh’s president in exile, was repeatedly interrogated by Armenian law-enforcement authorities in May and June this year. Shahramanian decided afterwards not to seek reelection backed by the main Karabakh factions. The Karabakh legislature has still not elected his successor.