Double standards: Speaker of parliament can spit on people, but  others cannot

ArmInfo. In Armenia, an 18-year-old boy has been charged with hooliganism for spitting on the official car of Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, as reported by lawyer Ruben Melikyan in a live broadcast on his Facebook page.

The lawyer clarified that the incident occurred on March 29,  following the incident at St. Anne's Church, on Palm Sunday.  According to him, Mikael, an 18-year-old boy,  was taking out the  trash when he saw the Armenian prime minister's motorcade. He  approached and spat directly on Pashinyan's service car. When asked  why, he replied, "Because the Turk sold our lands." However, as the  lawyer noted, the car was essentially performing a political, not a  state, function at the time, and the Armenian prime minister was  using the official car for his own party purposes. "The young man was  then detained for 48 hours, and a prosecutor's decision was  presented, finding his actions to be hooliganism-related. He is  currently a defendant, and a travel restriction measure has been  imposed on him," Melikyan said.

The lawyer drew a sharp parallel to a 2023 incident involving  National Assembly Speaker Alen Simonyan, who infamously spat in the  face of a citizen who called him a "traitor." "It appears Alen  Simonyan can spit in a citizen's face without facing a single  criminal charge or detention," Melikyan noted. "Yet a young man who  expresses his political dissent in an admittedly impolite way-by  spitting on a piece of metal-is treated as a criminal and locked up  for two days. This is a clearly discriminatory approach. Moreover,  the young man was detained for 48 hours. Essentially, children in  Armenia are being shown today that the rule of law doesn't apply  equally in the country," the lawyer concluded.