A1 Plus Anniversary Protest Rally, Yerevan, Republic of Armenia © Onnik Krikorian / Hetq Online 2004

As the 2007 parliamentary election approaches, pressure on the local media has started to intensify as it always does. In 2002, A1 Plus was taken off the airwaves ahead of the 2003 presidential and parliamentary elections, and was recently evicted from its offices. The station is still unable to broadcast, but this latest move by the authorities now disrupts its ability to publish a newspaper and to update its web site.

A1+, Armenia’s leading independent television station pulled off the air four years ago, is facing an even more uncertain future after being squeezed out of its state-owned offices in Yerevan.

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“We are forced to stand idle, I don’t know for how long,” the station’s owner and director, Mesrop Movsesian, told RFE/RL. “I don’t know when and how a solution can be found.”

Movsesian said his company will have trouble continuing to publish its newspaper and popular news website and meeting its contractual obligations to regional TV stations that still commission programs from A1+.

A1+, the only national channel that was not loyal to the administration of President Robert Kocharian, was forced off the air in April 2002 just hours after losing its air frequency in a supposedly competitive tender that was administered by a Kocharian-controlled body. It has since participated in 11 other frequency contests and lost all of them.

The Armenian authorities have refused to enable the channel to resume broadcasts despite pressure from the Council of Europe and other international watchdogs.

More alarmingly, the editor of a newspaper critical of the Government was arrested on 26 June and is still in pre-trial detention. His crime was the same that many of the sons of senior government officials are also guilty of, and one that does not usually neccesitate incarceration. Zhamanak has readers in both Armenia and the Diaspora.

The New York based Committee for the Protection of Journalists has already put out an Alert.

The editor of an opposition daily has been jailed in the Armenian capital, Yerevan, for more than two weeks without bail. Arman Babadzhanian, editor-in-chief of Zhamanak Yerevan (Yerevan Times), faces up to five years in prison for allegedly forging documents to avoid military service, but the Committee to Protect Journalists and others are concerned that the charge was prompted by his newspaper’s critical reporting on government conduct.

Babadzhanian was arrested June 26, just days after the Armenian-language newspaper published an article questioning the independence of the prosecutor general’s office, said Seda Muradian of the London-based Institute for War and Peace Reporting (IWPR), which has followed the case closely. Authorities allege that forgeries occurred in 2002, but they did not explain the delay in pressing charges.

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Babadzhanian was being held today in the Nabarashen pretrial detention center in Yerevan, according to the Yerevan Press Club. His lawyer unsuccessfully sought Babadzhanian’s release from preliminary detention while the case was pending. CPJ sources said that Babadzhanian could remain imprisoned without bail for weeks before the case proceeds.

Muradian, Armenia country director for IWPR, said the prosecutor’s refusal to grant Babadzhanian preliminary release on bail is very unusual in this type of case. “Authorities are treating Babadzhanian as a dangerous criminal,” Muradian told CPJ.

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“We are very concerned that the criminal case against Arman Babadzhanian may be related to his journalism,” CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said today. “We call on Armenian authorities to release him pending trial and make their evidence against him public.”

Several media organizations, including the Investigative Journalists of Armenia / Hetq Online, have issued a statement expressing their concern with what appears to be yet another attack on the press. Given that all signs are pointing to the conduct of elections scheduled for 2007 and 2008 to be less than democratic, perhaps their concerns are justified.

From the very start we were concerned over the way the Chief Editor of “Zhamanak-Yerevan” was “invited” to the Prosecutor’s Office and the concealment of the name of attorney, “present” at the first interrogation.

The choice of arrest as a preventive punishment became even more resonant, since, firstly, it is taken to be a blow on the newspaper, and, secondly, is viewed as an infringement of the right of a journalist, moreover, an opposition journalist, to freedom of expression, and as a response to his activities.

We, the representatives of NGOs, not excluding the criminal proceedings on the case, express our alarm at the choice of arrest as preventive punishment, qualifying it as pressure on an independent medium. We appeal to change the preventive punishment, particularly since Arman Babajanian has already demonstrated his readiness to collaborate with the investigative bodies and is not going to impede the investigation in any way.

RFE/RL has also reported on this story here, here, and here.