Ruben Melikyan: Armen Grigoryan will be legally acquitted

Armen Grigoryan’s lawyer Ruben Melikyan told Alpha News that the proceedings continued due to the requested acquittal.

“It is envisaged that after the death of the defendant, his legal successor, in this case his son Tigran, should be able to decide either to agree to the termination of the proceedings on the basis of death, which is an unjustified reason, or to demand acquittal. Tigran demanded an acquittal; that’s why the proceedings continued. During the trial, which lasted a year and a half, we saw, for example, how someone comes and says: I didn’t write anything personally, they wrote to me, I signed it. During the public trial, an expert comes and says: oh, look, I wrote hostility based on nationality, it’s wrong, it would be more correct to write the word ‘intra-national’ there,” Melikyan said.

He is convinced that there will soon be a guilty verdict.

“I think we solved our problem with the help of a public trial. It may sound paradoxical at first glance, but we have almost no doubt that there will be a guilty verdict, given the fact that we are dealing with a judge whose level of impartiality is very low, to say the least.

Secondly, if there was an acquittal, questions would arise as to why Armen Grigoryan ended up in the detention facility. However, we are sure that, in the end, we will have an acquittal; we do not know when it will be, in which hall, in which court: the Court of Appeal, the Court of Cassation or the European Court. When these political reasons regarding the prosecution of Armen Grigoryan disappear, Armenia will be in a more favorable position. These issues will surely be raised, and Armen Grigoryan will be legally acquitted,” said the lawyer.

He added that the prosecution was well prepared both throughout the trial and during closing statements.

“This issue is fundamental not only for us but also for them, to put it mildly, to hide their mistakes,” Ruben Melikyan concluded.