By Lia Avagyan
A senior Armenian lawmaker said the long-awaited parliamentary report on the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war ended up in parliament’s classified archive because of what he described as a misinterpretation of the law, and pledged to explore ways to make it accessible to the public.
Vilen Gabrielyan, a lawmaker from the ruling Civil Contract party and the nominee to chair parliament’s Standing Committee on Defense and Security, made the comments in an interview with CivilNet on Tuesday.
Gabrielyan served on the parliamentary commission that investigated the circumstances of the 44-day war until he resigned his parliamentary mandate in April 2025. He said the commission was established to provide the public with answers about the war and Armenia’s defeat.
“Since our public is essentially not familiar with the actual content of the report, it means that the commission as such did not serve its purpose,” Gabrielyan said.
He noted that the defense committee chair does not possess the legal power to unilaterally order the report made public, but argued that the legal issues preventing its release need to be reviewed.
“I think there was a misinterpretation of the law,” Gabrielyan said, adding that legislative steps could be considered to resolve the issue and make the report accessible.
“The public’s right to be informed cannot be violated,” he said.
Gabrielyan stopped short of blaming a particular official for the decision. When pressed about disagreements between then-parliament speaker Alen Simonyan and the commission’s chair, Andranik Kocharyan, he said they had interpreted the relevant law differently.
“The objective was for the public to be informed. The objective was not achieved,” Gabrielyan said. “The public’s right to be informed has effectively been violated, and work must be done to restore that right.”
Three-year inquiry ends in classified archive
Parliament established the investigative commission in February 2022, about 15 months after the end of the 44-day war between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh. The ruling Civil Contract party initiated the inquiry, headed by Kocharyan, then-chair of parliament’s defense and security committee. Opposition lawmakers boycotted its work, arguing that the government could not objectively investigate a war and defeat that occurred under its watch.
The commission examined classified documents and questioned senior political and military officials, including Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan, wartime Chief of the General Staff Onik Gasparyan, former Defense Minister Davit Tonoyan and former Foreign Minister Zohrab Mnatsakanyan.
The report was submitted to the Speaker of Parliament in September, 2025, but the expected parliamentary debate never took place.
Simonyan said the commission had no legal basis to put the report on the plenary agenda because it had missed statutory deadlines. Kocharyan disputed that interpretation, arguing that the speaker was required to submit the report to parliament.
The report was subsequently placed in parliament’s classified archive. It can be accessed only by lawmakers with the required security clearance and has not been made available to the public.
Kocharyan later said non-classified portions would eventually be released, but no timetable was provided.
Gabrielyan now says the issue should be revisited regardless of whether he becomes chairman of the defense committee. “I need to understand whether this problem has a solution or not,” he said.
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