Artur Davtyan, who served as Armenia’s prosecutor-general until September 2022, has added his voice to demands for Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s resignation made during ongoing antigovernment protests in Armenia.
Davtyan, who now teaches law at Yerevan State University (YSU), is one of more than 50 university professors who have signed a petition backing the protest movement led by Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan. He attended on Friday Galstanyan’s fresh meeting with YSU students boycotting classes in a show of support for the opposition-backed movement.
“I too think that Armenia’s current prime minister must go because I think that no solution is offered [by him] in this dire and complicated situation,” Davtyan told reporters outside the main university building.
Davtyan condemned Pashinyan’s decision to transfer several border areas to Azerbaijan which sparked the protests late last month. He dismissed the premier’s claim that failure to make the territorial concessions would provoke Azerbaijani military aggression against Armenia.
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“This is not a good or bad solution, this is an absence of it,” he said. “They have said that ‘if we don’t carry out a process of border delimitation we will get a war, but even if we carry it out we don’t know whether or not there will be a war.’”
“The prime minister’s job is to make sure that we win wars. What kind of scaremongering is this?” added the 45-year-old.
Davtyan was appointed as prosecutor-general in 2016 by Armenia’s parliament dominated by then President Serzh Sarkisian’s loyalists. He retained his post after Sarkisian resigned in 2018 amid mass protests led by Pashinyan.
In the following years, Armenian opposition leaders regularly accused Davtyan of executing Pashinyan’s orders to prosecute and jail government critics. He always denied the accusations.
Pashinyan and his political allies, who control the current parliament, decided in 2022 not to appoint Davtyan for a second six-year term. He was replaced by Anna Vardapetian, a former aide to Pashinyan.