The opposition has the right to boycott the work of the inquiry committee on the crisis in the church, but we had no other expectations, speaker of the National Assembly (NA) of Armenia, Ruben Rubinyan, on Tuesday told a press briefing in the NA.

“It is obvious that our opposition colleagues are not interested in the entire palette of negative and shameful actions of their partners, their accomplices, be opened to the public. Ktrich Nersisyan [i.e. the secular name of Catholicos of All Armenians Karekin II] is their accomplice in a political sense, Ktrich Nersisyan’s brother, who was a proven KGB agent, is their political companion and partner, and all those clergymen [of the Armenian Apostolic Church] who have committed numerous violations of canon law and violated their vows before God are also their partners. I don’t know how comfortable they [i.e. the Armenian parliamentary opposition] feel when they are in the same moral field as these people, but that’s their business. But it’s normal, it’s natural that they shouldn’t be interested in participating in the work of this committee, but that work won’t suffer from that,” Rubinyan said.

Also, he stated that if opposition MPs didn’t come to the NA sessions’ hall at all, the NA work also wouldn’t suffer at all.

“And the quality would improve a lot. There are MPs among them who, if they were not there, the quality of our debates in the NA would have improved 10, 20, 30, 40 times,” he added.

Regarding the opposition’s claims that the authorities’ actions against the Armenian Apostolic Church are unconstitutional and those who carried them out will be tried sooner or later, the NA speaker said: “I think that all those individuals who used a mechanism of targeted and large-scale electoral fraud during the June 7, 2026 [parliamentary] elections, and all those individuals who, according to the approved and official assessment of the PACE, were elected by foreign forces using tools of economic pressure and security threats, should be tried. They should be tried one by one. They should be tried in this way, one by one, and I am glad that this process, it seems, has begun.”