{"id":223614,"date":"2026-01-07T10:33:13","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T06:33:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/?p=223614"},"modified":"2026-01-07T13:34:56","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T09:34:56","slug":"lawyer-vows-to-defend-armenian-churchs-freedom-against-government-interference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/news\/223614\/","title":{"rendered":"Lawyer vows to defend Armenian Church\u2019s freedom against government interference"},"content":{"rendered":"<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC \"-\/\/W3C\/\/DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional\/\/EN\" \"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/TR\/REC-html40\/loose.dtd\">\n<html><body><p>Robert Amsterdam, international lawyer for businessman Samvel Karapetyan, has stated that they will not tolerate illegal actions by Armenian authorities against the Armenian Apostolic Church, pledging to defend its freedom on international platforms.<\/p>\n<p>According to Amsterdam, the intervention of Nikol Pashinyan&rsquo;s government in the Church&rsquo;s affairs represents a direct attack on democracy and the Constitution.<\/p>\n<p>&ldquo;This reminds me of only one historical precedent &mdash; the Bolshevik repression and their attempts to divide the Church. I want to be clear: we will not tolerate this illegality. We will defend the Church&rsquo;s freedom strictly within legal frameworks and on international legal platforms,&rdquo; the lawyer wrote on Facebook, sharing a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/reel\/803978999329987\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">video<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Robert Amsterdam, international lawyer for businessman Samvel Karapetyan, has stated that they will not tolerate illegal actions by Armenian authorities against the Armenian Apostolic Church, pledging to defend its freedom on international platforms. According to Amsterdam, the intervention of Nikol Pashinyan&rsquo;s government in the Church&rsquo;s affairs represents a direct attack on democracy and the Constitution. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":223504,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,47,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-society","category-law"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":223615,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223614\/revisions\/223615"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/223504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/abcmedia.am\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}