Today, the first court session of Artur Grigoryan vs. the Hraparak newspaper took place at the trial court of the Kentron and Nork-Marash districts of Yerevan.
Let us remind that the petitioner, counselor Artur Grigoryan, demands 18 million AMD from the newspaper for comments made under an article about him on the www.hraparak.am website, claiming that those contain offence and slander about him.
Counselor of the petitioner Tigran Atanesyan claimed during the court session that the daily newspaper had deliberately not removed the slandering comments for a few months. The defense claimed that the internet comments had not been supervised and that the management got familiar with those only after familiarizing themselves with the lawsuit. The defense also noted that the petitioner had never applied to them demanding the removal of the comments, but had immediately brought a lawsuit to court.
After the session, counselor of the petitioner Tigran Atanesyan said that before the trial they had called the editor of the newspaper as a friend and had expressed their disapproval, “The article was published on August 10. Before that we had had friendly relationship. Artur called Armine and said that everything was fine, they did the right thing writing it, but it would have been better, if the last line of the article was like this, because they doubted Artur’s honesty by those lines. Armine said it was the approach of an editor. We forgot about everything. In September, we noticed that those comments appeared the day after our conversation. We think that it was not a coincidence. Artur Grigoryan is a private individual, why would everybody’s attention be focused on him, does everyone read Hraparak?”
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Offended counselor Artur Grigoryan was also present at the court session. In his words, he moved from the field of journalism to the field of justice, “I have sued everyone complaining about me as libelers and I will be consistent, if they are responsible for what they have said, let them come to the court and prove.” In response to our question how many people he had sued, he couldn’t tell, “I have lost count of them.”
Mr. Grigoryan was surprised by our question why he had immediately started a legal action and had not demanded to remove the offensive comments about him from the newspaper, “Why should I have applied. The law gives me that right to apply for the court’s protection and as for removing comments, ask Armine Ohanyan, she will go into details whether I had contacts with that newspaper or not.”
The time for the next court session was appointed March 7, 2:50 pm.
Arpine SIMONYAN
