Media

In an online discussion assessing the state of democracy in Armenia, Freedom House hosted an event on 11 February 2021 entitled, “The Current Narratives about the Correlation of Democracy, Human Rights and Security in Post-War Armenia: True or False?”  The event on Armenia included opening remarks by Marc Behrendt, the Director of the Europe and Eurasia Programs (EEP) of Freedom House, followed by a brief presentation about the project and presentation of the topic by Sossi Tatikyan, the Project Coordinator of Freedom House in Armenia.

Assessing political developments in Armenia, Richard Giragosian, the Director of the Regional Studies Center (RSC), warned of “the end of Armenia's post-revolution honeymoon,” noting that “two years after the Velvet revolution, post-war disillusionment has put Prime Minister Pashinyan's political future in question.”

In a commentary for the Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), Regional Studies Center (RSC) Director Richard Giragosian offered a critical assessment of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan.  Published on 16 November 2021, the article, entitled, “Armenian Prime Minister Under Threat,” noted that “the tactical flexibility and impressive self-confidence that fueled Pashinyan’s rise to power have become his biggest weaknesses.”

RSC Director Richard Giragosian was the guest of the weekly Facebook podcast hosted by European Parliamentarians, former two-time Lithuanian Prime Minister Andrius Kubilius and former Lithuanian Minister of Defense Rasa Jukneviciene. He presented a broad and sweeping overview of the Armenia’s accomplishments and achievements in democratic reform while also assessing the difficult geopolitical challenges facing Armenia, including dealing with Turkey, Azerbaijan and Iran, the Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) peace process, as well as the country’s strategic relations with Russia and the European Union (EU).

In the first segment of a two-part interview with Meline Petrosyan for 365news.am published on 28 May, RSC Director Richard Giragosian commented on Armenian-German relations and assessed German foreign policy and diplomacy related to the Nagorno Karabakh (Artsakh) conflict. In the second part of the interview, Giragosian focused on the European Court of Human Rights’ (ECHR) recent ruling that determined that Azerbaijan violated a key European convention by pardoning, rewarding and glorifying an Azerbaijani army officer who brutally murdered an Armenian officer in a barbaric attack with an axe during a NATO course in Hungary in 2004. This ruling found that Azerbaijan’s actions amounted to the “approval” and “endorsement” of the “very serious, ethnically-biased crime” committed by the officer, Ramil Safarov.