Grounds for Arresting Lawyer Robert Amsterdam Being Established

Member of Samvel Karapetyan’s defense team, American-Jewish lawyer Robert Amsterdam's statements were circulated for hours yesterday by officials of the ruling Civil Contract party (CP) who effectively instructed law enforcement to arrest the attorney for speaking against the Republic of Armenia. This was reported by the newspaper ‘Zhoghovurd’.

“So what did the American lawyer say? ‘We will attack Armenia every day until Samvel Karapetyan is released.’” The newspaper learned that government circles have set a goal to imprison their new ‘target’. Although the lawyer later clarified that he was referring to tools of international legal and political pressure, rather than physical actions, CP deputies and their associated NGOs interpreted the statement as an ‘anti-state threat’.

It is noteworthy that the method is the same: just as Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan wrote that the benefactor said, ‘I will intervene,’ and this wording formed the basis for the accusation against the benefactor, the same applies to the lawyer's case. The lawyer says, ‘We will attack Armenia…’ and continues to explain how, while the CP started spreading that the lawyer stated, ‘We will launch an assault against Armenia’; therefore, he must be punished.

Based on this, discussions are already underway in government circles regarding restricting Robert Amsterdam's activities. Political analysts note that the authorities are once again attempting to apply a familiar mechanism: first, an ‘anti-state’ narrative is formed, and then the case is transferred to a legal platform, just as it happened in the case of Samvel Karapetyan’s 37-second message. The benefactor was arrested for the phrase ‘We will participate in our own way’; he has been in prison for 121 days,” the newspaper reported.