Judge Who Imposed Pretrial Detention on Armen Grigoryan Comments on Producer's Sudden Death

Today, producer Armen Grigoryan unexpectedly passed away in the courtroom. He had been in pretrial detention since May 18. The decision to detain him was made by Arusyak Aleksanyan, a judge of the Yerevan City Court of First Instance, who had also imposed detention sanctions on Avetik Chalabyan, Mamikon Aslanyan, Mika Badalyan, and Narek Mantashyan. It is worth noting that prior to becoming a judge, Aleksanyan worked as an investigator at the Special Investigative Service from 2018 to 2022, when Sasun Khachatryan was the head.

Hraparak.am contacted Judge Arusyak Aleksanyan, who made the detention decision, to inquire what she could say regarding the death of producer Armen Grigoryan, especially since she is being accused directly or indirectly on the internet of being responsible for the producer's demise and for allegedly conducting political persecution. This is in relation to the detention order against an intellectual who had not committed any criminal act but had only criticized Prime Minister Pashinyan and his government.

“I have the impression that there is a large group of people who seem to be waiting for something bad to happen to start a parade, but I don’t want to give any other comments on that. Regarding the legality and justification of the detention, I declare with full responsibility that neither from the defense side nor from the investigator's side has any document, whether medical or of any other nature, been presented to indicate that Mr. Grigoryan had any type of illness. Even verbally, such information was not provided to the court,” said Aleksanyan.

Regarding Armen Grigoryan's death, Aleksanyan commented, “I deeply sympathize with his relatives, and the only thing I regret is that a person has died. I see no need to be concerned about anything else.”