Ms. Human Rights Defender, publicly expose the fabrications and manipulations of our publications
Human Rights Defender (HRD) Kristinne Grigoryan did something that perhaps no ombudsman in RA had ever done before.
“168.am media consistently spreads false and misleading information about the activities of the Office of the Human Rights Defender. Today, the mentioned media published false information under the title “HRD of Armenia has refused to deal with the issues of those displaced from Hadrut, referring to the authorities of Artsakh”, wrote Kristinne Grigoryan on the official Facebook page of HRD, subsequently giving “clarifications” regarding the publication.
At the end, she added: “We wish sound health to those in charge of this media.”
They didn’t save any efforts at all, they even made a photo as a sign with the caption “168.am is spreading fake news”.
In fact, the content of the publication is of utmost importance here, but the fact that 168.am republished the material by “Pastinfo”: in the text it was written in black and white that the author is the mentioned webpage. Moreover, the original source of the material, the website pastinfo.am, did not make up anything, it transferred the words of a specific person, and even published her photo.
In other words, the Human Rights Defender targeted a specific media without getting acquainted with the published material. Now we don’t want to delve into who “dragged” Kristinne Grigoryan, or how come the HRD who wrote a sarcastic post, the Ombudsman who wishes sound health to the people in charge of our media, does not read the publication about which she makes such a post.
By the way, it turns out that this is not the only tough mistake of this kind made during the short period of the tenure of HRD Kristinne Grigoryan, it happened to other non-governmental media as well, she sent a written complaint to the National Television and Radio Commission (NTRC)- Tigran Hakobyan, to call the TV company to order, meanwhile, based on Kristinne Grigoryan’s letter, she wrote a conciliatory letter to that TV company, calling for order, then it turned out that the report was actually prepared by the Public TV company, but was attributed to the opposition media.
Anyway, our harsh response to Kristinne Grigoryan didn’t come too late. The editor-in-chief of 168 Hours newspaper and 168.am website, Satik Seyranyan, made a post on her Facebook page with proper justifications and references, where she pointed out how Kristinne Grigoryan is targeting our media, why she should not enter where she dared to enter with her stupidity and short-sightedness. The post was shared by a great number of media outlets and individual users.
Anyway, it’s her decision. In any case, we, in our turn, wished her sound eyesight and basic reading ability.
One more remarkable circumstance. We appropriately put the link to the post, under that Facebook post of the RA Human Rights Defender, but it disappeared. We put it again in the morning, it disappeared again. We weren’t making any comments, just posting a link to our website in response to a post that was instantly deleted. Maybe Ms. HRD was ashamed that, having such a representative position, she appeared in an absurd and shameful story. After about the 10th time, we no longer posted the link to our website under the HRD post, which persistently removed comments criticizing their post, and instead kept posts by fake users criticizing and targeting 168.am and other media. As it is said, “С вами все ясно”. (You are done with that)
Hours later, in the comments section of her post, HRD warned:
Dear users,
Please follow the norms of ethics and do not spread comments containing hate speech (swear words, calls for violence, insults). WARNING: comments with similar content will be removed from the page. And in case of repetition of such comments, the access of users spreading hate speech will be blocked.
It was not clear who it was directed at, or perhaps preparations are being made to block people pointing out their fabrication.
By the way, everyone remembers how Kristinne Grigoryan, who had just set foot in the building of the HRD, struggled for the Facebook page of the former Defender Minister Arman Tatoyan, created from scratch, mobilizing all the resources of the Civil Contract (CC) party for this. We have covered this story in detail. It seemed to her that after possessing a page with 54,000 subscribers, she would have the same reputation as Arman Tatoyan. Let’s leave aside the fact that out of those 54,000, Kristinne Grigoryan’s activities are followed only by 50-60 people, including journalists and her friends and family members, but, in fact, the skirmish for the page was to target the mass media with that page.
It is noteworthy that the CC and CC-side big and small interested persons who accused Arman Tatoyan of not returning the HRD page, which was actually a technical problem, and was resolved within days, for some reason, did not remember that their beloved CC Minister of Justice Karen Andreasyan, when saying goodbye to the position of HRD, took with him and did not return HRD’s existing Facebook page with 10,000 followers and turned it into the page of his own law firm. Thus, Karen Andreasyan’s “AM” law office, as they say, became a page with 10,000 followers out of thin air.
From now on, Kristinne Grigoryan can count all the links, one of which has already been posted above, and the others will be posted below.
From the moment it became known that Kristinne Grigoryan is the candidate of the authorities for the position of HRD, 168.am has made 19 publications about her activities.
We propose Ms. HRD to state one by one which part of each publication of 168.am she considers to be false and misleading information, which, according to her, we consistently spread.
On December 16, 2021, after the CC members nominated Kristinne Grigoryan to the position of HRD, we referred to the fact that it was Kristinne Grigoryan who was the representative of the government reporting the infamous Article 137.1 or “serious offense” of the Criminal Code, when she was the Deputy Minister of Justice. By the way, the article was decriminalized in the New Criminal Code.
The next day, on December 17, we reminded our readers how the Constitutional Court postponed the session due to a bad translation by Kristinne Grigoryan, a representative of the government who masters English, Russian, French, Arabic and German, until she corrected her translation errors from English to Armenian.
On January 27, 2022, during the Facebook press conference on “Azatutyan”, we referred to Kristinne Grigoryan’s reference to calling journalists “verbal prostitutes” by CC MP Vahagn Aleksanyan, in which the non-official, but already elected HRD tried to justify or defend the representative of her political team.
On March 2, we presented in detail the history of the car contest for the introduction of the Patrol Service, or rather, we recalled the story of how advocates of this service, one of the coordinators of the implementation of the Patrol Service and the program coordinator of the NGO “Union of Informed Citizens” Daniel Ioannisyan and with the light hand of Kristinne Grigoryan- then the former Deputy Minister of Justice, “Skoda” won that competition, which, as life has shown, was not suitable for that service.
On March 4, we reported that the former head of the Civil Status Acts Registration Agency of the Ministry of Justice, Ani Mkhitaryan, the long-time friend of Kristinne Grigoryan, accused in the infamous case of child trafficking, would become the general secretary of HRD.
On March 7, we wrote that Ani Mkhitaryan was already introduced to the HRD staff.
On that very day, in another publication, we referred to Kristinne Grigoyan’s first official visit to Artsakh in the position of Human Rights Defender, in which the following sentence was included: “On March 4, I made my first working visit to Artsakh outside the borders of the Republic of Armenia as the Human Rights Defender of the Republic of Armenia”. We wrote about the hazards of this phrase.
On March 26, we wrote about the populist declaration of the Human Rights Defender following the protest of the residents of Tsovagyugh and Semyonovka villages of Gegharkunik region against the enlargement of the communities and inclusion in the Sevan community, that “the Human Rights Defender will continue to keep under her direct attention the problems raised by the residents and within the limits of her competence will support the solution of the situation” when she had no leverage to help people.
On April 5, we informed that the annual report of HRD last year, which was completely prepared by Arman Tatoyan, will be presented in the National Assembly by Kristinne Grigoryan, when she has no organic connection with that report.
On April 11, we published the responses to our written request to the HRD regarding the topic.
On May 1, before the rally Kristinne Grigoryan made a statement. We analyzed that statement, referring to its vulnerable aspects.
On May 24, we referred to the telephone conversation between the Human Rights Defender of the Republic of Armenia and the Russian Federation, regarding to which we noticed a very telling omission in the Armenian version.
On June 3, we wrote that the preliminary investigation of the criminal case against Ani Mkhitaryan, the general secretary of the RA HRD staff, who is involved in the case of illegal adoptions, has been completed.
On June 9, without any comment, we published the transcript of the RA HRD’s comment on the events that took place in the Proshyan-Demirchyan-Leo intersection on June 3 during a briefing with journalists in the National Assembly.
On June 10, we tried to give the answer to the question why the Deputy Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Democracy, Kara McDonald, who participated in the Pride party at the US Embassy, was interested in the priorities of the RA Defender.
On June 15, when exactly 5 days ago, the Minister of Justice Karen Andreasyan “announced” that the new Criminal Code will not contain the notorious “blasphemy article” 137.1, we carefully addressed all the actors related to that article.
On June 17, we wrote about the interest of US officials in Kristinne Grigoryan’s drive to have comprehensive anti-discrimination legislation, and her invaluable assistance to law enforcement in connection with the events of June 3.
The last time 168.am covered HRD Kristinne Grigoryan on July 2. We wrote about the trend of expected structural changes in HRD.
That’s it. Now Kristinne Grigoryan has a wide opportunity to show the fabrications and manipulations of our publications one by one without wasting nerves and time on searching.
And we will go on writing about the vices prevailing in the HRD. In the near future, we will look at the mechanism of distribution of bonuses, why not only the former employees who left their jobs are currently looking for a new job, but also the personnel brought by her, who, by the way, are in high positions, are leaving HRD office; we will talk about its causes, the intolerable atmosphere prevailing in the HRD, the intentions of the “spokesman” in the HRD, the Defender’s intentions, which will be related to the labor rights of the staff.
There are many issues that we will cover in turn.
So far, one more piece of advice, this time to the HRD news service. Get your website in order, where the text and audio versions of the officials do not overlap, thus for instance, the General Secretary of the HRD is not Tigran Martirosyan in the audio version, and Ani Mkhitaryan in the text version. And so it is in the case of everyone, including the head of public relations department Edgar Ayvazyan.
Partnership solidarity did not allow to address this earlier, but HRD seems to not know what it is.
What is unfortunate in this whole story is that the HRD, who should have had a completely different title, functions and priorities, continues the political authorities’ line of targeting, discrediting the media, generating insult and hatred towards them.
The same handwriting
By the way, for about 1 year, since 2020, some Armenian media have been facing serious problems on social networks. About a year ago, the Armenian-language website with a Georgian domain, factcheck.ge, in cooperation with the Armenian website media.am, began to fight against the Facebook pages of some non-governmental media outlets, which were supposedly disinformation, but in reality, were selectively targeted as fake news, manipulative to publish articles. Their target was especially those media outlets that are legally active, have been operating for about 20 years, and fulfill their conscientious tax obligations, which are known to the public for their oppositional views.
The Center for Media Initiatives, within the framework of which the mentioned media.am operates, made that website a tool, without discussion with professional experts and by subjective choice, in their opinion, by detecting fake news and manipulative articles, and related to them through another organization transmitted mediated information to the Facebook social network, which blocked the Facebook pages of many Armenian news websites, stopped advertising, limited the access and visibility of publications to thousands of readers. Some representatives of the Armenian press, including 168.am, were hit the hardest and suffered serious damage, which continues until now.
As a result of all that, thousands of readers and subscribers are still unable to follow the publications of these media. As a result, the Facebook page of the website, which has more than 180,000 followers, has lost a significant portion of its readership, limited visibility, and is generally in danger of being closed down.
This is a serious thrust to freedom of speech, a restriction of the right to be informed.
Did you notice? The handwriting appears to be the same.
Hopefully, Kristinne Grigoryan’s attacks against the media will end with this, and the Defender, who has a direct duty to show respect to the media, will not present new “surprises” to the media.
By Gohar Savzyan
