YEREVAN (Azatutyun) — The Armenian government has officially thrown its weight behind Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan’s yearlong campaign to depose Catholicos Karekin II, which opposition leaders and legal experts see as unconstitutional.
In its five-year policy program publicized late on August 20, the government pledged to “ensure the removal of the de facto head of the Armenian Apostolic Holy Church” and “carry out the election” of his temporary replacement through an unspecified “established procedure.”
Pashinyan has been trying to do that since June 2025. He began pressuring Karekin to resign after the Catholicos accused Azerbaijan of committing ethnic cleansing in Nagorno-Karabakh and illegally occupying Armenian border areas during an international conference in Switzerland. Three Armenian archbishops and one bishop were arrested in the following months on different charges strongly denied by them. They were all moved to house arrest this year.
Law-enforcement authorities also indicted Karekin himself as well as six other senior clergymen in February. Earlier this month, they went on trial strongly condemned by Armenian opposition and Diaspora groups. The Catholicos has made it clear that he will not step down even if he is imprisoned.
Pashinyan’s critics maintain that his campaign constitutes a gross violation of Armenian constitutional provisions guaranteeing the autonomy of the ancient church and its separation from the state. In an August 7 statement, the World Council of Churches (WCC) similarly deplored the “undue interference” in its internal affairs.
Pashinyan has used different lines of attack on the church during his campaign praised by Azerbaijani officials. He said until December that Karekin and other top clerics at odds with him must go because they had secret sex affairs in breach of their vows of celibacy. He then began accusing them of spying for a foreign country, presumably Russia. He did not offer any proof of the allegation dismissed by Moscow.
