About Hraparak

Hraparak

Hraparak is an Armenian-language daily newspaper based in Yerevan, Armenia. Its name means Square in Armenian, a reference to the public square as the place where citizens gather and speak. Founded in 2008, it has built a reputation as an independent newspaper critical of successive Armenian governments, edited since its founding by Armine Ohanyan, who also writes its signed editorials. Hraparak publishes in print and through its website, hraparak.am, and is one of the titles most frequently cited in international reporting on the legal pressures faced by the Armenian press.

Hraparak appeared at a difficult moment. It was established in the year of Armenia's disputed 2008 presidential election and the March 1 killings in Yerevan, and it grew up in a period when the main instruments of pressure on newspapers were shifting from direct closure to civil defamation litigation with damages large enough to threaten a small daily's survival. Its history illustrates that shift in detail: frozen assets, seized property, court bans on covering a case, and lawsuits over readers' comments all feature in its record.

Founding in 2008

Hraparak was founded in 2008. The Media Ownership Monitor Armenia records Armine Ohanyan as its co-founder and chief editor from that year, holding majority ownership of the publication through Hraparak Daily LLC, and Sevak Grigoryan as co-founder and minority shareholder with a ten percent stake. The newspaper's contact address is on Buzand Street in central Yerevan. The timing of its launch matters for understanding its identity. Armenia in 2008 was entering a period of intense confrontation between the government of incoming president Serzh Sargsyan and an opposition energised by the disputed election. A new daily that defined itself as independent and critical was entering a market that was small, poor and politically polarised, but in which a combative newspaper could quickly acquire a loyal readership.

Armine Ohanyan and Editorial Leadership

Armine Ohanyan has been Hraparak's editor-in-chief since 2008 and is the public face of the newspaper. She brought long experience to the role, having worked as a correspondent for several newspapers including the dailies Azg and Haykakan Zhamanak. From 1994 to 1997 she was chief editor of Dproc, the School newspaper of the Ministry of Education, she later worked with the Yerevan press centre, and in 2006 she served briefly, from February to June, as press secretary of the Civil Cassation Chamber of the Court of Cassation before returning to journalism. That background, which spans education publishing, press administration and the judiciary's press office as well as opposition newspapers, is unusual among Armenian editors and helps explain Hraparak's close attention to courts and legal affairs.

Ohanyan's editorial voice is not a formality. A Yerevan Press Club study of the use of open editorials and commentary in Armenian media found that during the monitored month of February, Hraparak published twenty-one editorial columns, all of them signed by its editor-in-chief. No related commentary genres by other hands appeared alongside them. The study places Hraparak in a recognisable Armenian tradition in which the editor personally fronts the newspaper's opinion, comparable to Aram Abrahamyan's column in Aravot and to the unsigned institutional editorials of Zhoghovurd, but distinct from both in that the voice is signed, personal and continuous.

Editorial Stance and Coverage

Hraparak is known as an independent, opposition-critical paper. Its reporting concentrates on Armenian domestic politics, government decision-making, the judiciary, law enforcement and corruption allegations, and on the social consequences of policy. In the press reviews compiled for years by RFE/RL's Armenian service, Hraparak's editorials appear alongside those of Aravot, Zhamanak and Zhoghovurd as part of the daily chorus through which Yerevan's newspapers argued about the government of the day. After the change of power in 2018 the newspaper did not retire its critical stance; like several titles founded in opposition, it continued to scrutinise the new authorities, which is one reason international monitors continue to classify it with Armenia's independent rather than pro-government press.

Defamation Litigation and Frozen Assets

No part of Hraparak's record is better documented than its defamation cases. In September 2011 RFE/RL reported that a Yerevan court had frozen three million drams, about 8,000 dollars, of the newspaper's assets after a libel lawsuit by Misak Martirosian, the head of the state Judicial Department. The court also banned Hraparak from reporting on the litigation pending a verdict. Ohanyan said the suit stemmed from two news stories about a letter the paper said had been sent by Judicial Department employees to the justice minister and the prosecutor-general, accusing Martirosian of corruption and other illegal practices. The paper had obtained a copy of the letter and reported on it. Some of the employees later withdrew their signatures after police opened a criminal investigation into the allegations. Ohanyan described the reporting ban as illegal and argued that the newspaper had been stripped of any possibility of defending itself.

The case was not isolated. In June 2011 a court froze Hraparak's bank accounts pending a verdict in a defamation suit brought by former president Robert Kocharyan. In November 2011 a court ordered that property of the newspaper be seized pending a decision in a lawsuit seeking 34,000 euros in compensation for allegedly slanderous comments posted by readers on the newspaper's website. Mesrop Harutiunian of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Speech denounced the 2011 court orders in an open letter to the justice minister as a blatant violation of press freedom. Freedom House's Freedom of the Press 2012 report on Armenia used Hraparak among its principal examples of the post-2010 pattern: libel had been decriminalised, but civil claims by politicians and officials, with compensation out of proportion to any damage, had become the main threat to newspaper survival.

The Readers' Comments Case

The lawsuit over website comments deserves separate attention because it raised a question that went beyond Hraparak. If a newspaper is liable for insults written by anonymous readers beneath its articles, every Armenian news site carries unlimited legal risk. In court proceedings reported by the Human Rights Association, Ohanyan explained the technical reality of the paper's site: comments had appeared automatically, without pre-moderation, until changes were made in late the previous year, after which comments appeared only after approval. She said the editorial office did not read comments one by one, though operators removed swearing when they noticed it, and she noted that comments insulting the editor and the newspaper themselves had not been removed either, which she offered as evidence that there was no selective suppression. The comments at issue in the suit were removed after she consulted lawyers. Ohanyan characterised the action as a step against freedom of speech. The case became a reference point in Armenian debates about online liability and moderation.

Legal Outcomes and Persistence

Hraparak's litigation history is not only a record of pressure; it also includes cases the newspaper and its founder ultimately won or saw resolved in their favour. Yerevan Press Club reporting in 2013 recorded that the Court of Cassation abolished an appeals court ruling in a case involving the founder of Hraparak, sustaining a first-instance decision that had dismissed the suit of Margarita Khachatrian against the paper. The detail matters because it complicates any simple account of Armenian courts as uniformly hostile to critical media in that period: outcomes were contested, appealed and sometimes reversed, and newspapers with the stamina and legal support to fight could prevail. Hraparak's distinction is that it kept publishing through the whole sequence rather than settling into silence.

Print and Digital Publishing

Hraparak publishes as a print daily in Yerevan and online at hraparak.am, which the Media Ownership Monitor treats as the digital counterpart of the same outlet. The website extends the newspaper's reporting through the day and hosts the reader-comment community that became legally significant in the comments case. As with other Armenian dailies, the centre of gravity of readership has moved online, while the print edition retains importance for the paper's identity and for its established readership in the capital. The newspaper is published in Armenian only, which focuses its audience on Armenia itself and on Armenian-reading diaspora audiences rather than the Russian- and English-reading publics served by some competitors.

Place in Armenian Media

Hraparak belongs to the generation of Armenian newspapers founded after the era of the great post-independence titles such as Azg and Aravot and after Haykakan Zhamanak had defined opposition journalism. It did not inherit a party, a famous founder-politician or a diaspora sponsor. What it built instead was an editorial identity centred on one editor's signed voice and a willingness to publish material, such as the Judicial Department employees' letter, that other outlets might have judged too legally dangerous to touch. International press-freedom reporting reached for Hraparak repeatedly in 2011 and 2012 precisely because its cases were so well documented, and that documentation now forms part of the standard account of how Armenia's media environment worked in the Sargsyan period.

Assessment

Hraparak's record is thin in some of the ways that affect many Armenian newspapers: reliable circulation figures, detailed staffing information and financial data are not publicly available, and the Media Ownership Monitor lists its revenue, market share and advertising share as missing data. What is available, unusually richly for an Armenian daily, is the legal record. Read together, the frozen assets, the reporting ban, the seized property, the comments litigation and the successful cassation appeal tell the story of independent newspaper publishing in Armenia in the 2010s more concretely than circulation statistics could. Hraparak endures as a Yerevan daily whose name, Square, it has spent its existence trying to live up to: a place in print where the conduct of the powerful is argued about in public.