When Hate Speech Law Becomes Political Speech Law: The Tale of Armenian Church and State
When a government cracks down on its loudest institutional critic and simultaneously drafts a law against speech that "humiliates" political opinions, the through-line is hard to miss.
Every country that regulates speech eventually discovers the same uncomfortable truth: laws written to shield people from hatred turn out to be remarkably well-suited for shielding governments from criticism. Even when legislation is drafted in good faith, its enforcement almost never is. Armenia is at the precipice of learning this lesson.
The Ministry of Justice has advanced a package that would extend liability for hate speech beyond the Criminal Code into civil and administrative law by creating new fines, fast-takedown duties, and conduct rules for the media. On top of that, it defines hate speech as anything that “humiliates, mocks, labels, or targets.” Not only are these concepts vague, leaving citizens unsure of what is off-limits, a law that turns on whether a sentence wounds, offends, or humiliates gives authorities broad discretion to punish speech they simply don’t like. That is the classic problem with vague speech laws. People who are unsure about what is illegal simply stop talking, and officials who are given sweeping powers tend to use them.
Crucially, “political opinion” is listed among the protected categories. In other words, the law would ban hate speech that “humiliates” or “mocks” someone’s political opinions or “worldviews.” But while hate speech laws are ordinarily justified as protection for historically vulnerable groups against dehumanizing attacks, they tend to punish political critics. Including denigration of “political opinion” — the one kind of speech that European law most emphatically protects — in hate speech legislation hands the government a tool to silence denigration of itself. It could also conceivably punish satire, which, by definition, mocks political opinions and worldviews.
And finally, the law would change how enforcement is designed to work. The draft imposes fines on media outlets and audiovisual service providers that fail to remove prohibited content, including content posted by users, immediately, but no later than three calendar days. Civil liability is expressly independent of criminal or administrative liability, meaning the same sentence can trigger all three at once.
No regulation should be read in a vacuum, and this one has arrived at a particularly tumultuous moment for the country. Over the past year, the Armenian government has conducted a visible campaign against its loudest institutional critic, the Armenian Apostolic Church.
The government of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan has moved repeatedly against its critics. Senior clergy of the Armenian Apostolic Church have been detained and arrested. Archbishop Bagrat Galstanyan, who led protests against territorial concessions, was detained on coup allegations; Archbishop Mikael Ajapahyan was sentenced to prison on similar grounds. The head of the Church, Garegin II, has faced travel restrictions and public calls for removal following disagreements with the government. The principle of separation of church and state is often described as mutual restraint. The state does not govern the church, and the church does not govern the state.
Armenia is a party to the European Convention on Human Rights, and Article 10 of that Convention is not a mere suggestion. Its core holding, repeated by the European Court of Human Rights for half a century, is that freedom of expression protects not only ideas that are welcome or harmless, but also those that offend, shock, or disturb. That directly conflicts with a statute whose operative verbs are “mock” and “denigrate.” Offense is not a recognized harm under Article 10; it is the price of living in a democracy, and Armenia must afford the same.
Calls for a Prime Minister to resign, criticism of territorial concessions, participation in protest movements, sermons that challenge the government’s handling of a war — these are not fringe cases of protected speech. They are the cases that legal doctrine is built to protect. They are, if the pun may be forgiven, canonical.
Armenia’s post-2018 “Velvet Revolution” was built on public demands for accountability, pluralism, and governance under law. Those commitments are written into the treaties Armenia has ratified, the Council of Europe institutions to which it belongs, and the constitutional text produced in the aftermath of that movement.
History has shown that, time and time again, when we sacrifice these commitments, freedom suffers and power consolidates. The question raised by this draft legislation is whether the legal order that emerged from a movement for pluralism is now setting up to police the boundaries of acceptable dissent.
Ashkhen Kazaryan is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Future of Free Speech, where she leads initiatives to protect free expression and shape policies that uphold the First Amendment in the digital age.
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