Eight years ago, on January 26 of 2002, Murad Bojolyan, an orientalist, journalist, former adviser of the first president of RA, was arrested. In 2003 Armenian courts sentenced him to 10 years of imprisonment charging him for high treason, spying for Turkey.

Bojolyan himself is convinced that he is convicted for his activities as a reporter, and the information that he allegedly passed to Turkish special services could not be state or military secret since he has taken them from public sources as a reporter. 

However, the preliminary investigation body had presented the Turkish reporters involved in the criminal case against Bojolyan, with whom Bojolyan had cooperated, as spies trying to substantiate Bojolyan's spying.

Bojolyan rejected the charges against him and the same year applied to the European Court of Human Rights.

"He is a reporter for a number of Turkish newspapers and has performed his responsibilities as a reporter, and if the Government's statement is really true that he had really passed state or military secrets, they should have clearly shown that. It is not quite clear exactly what information, to whom and how he had passed. This issue is unclear. This is the subject of his claim," says Ara Ghazaryan, Bojolyan's representative in the European Court. He believes that the European Court had to consider the case and find out if Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights - the right to freedom of expression, was violated.

Murad Bojolyan, whoh has been in prison for about 8 years, had passed from his jail cell that during these long years he had always believed that justice would prevail by all means; he had expressed his conviction that one day there would be justice also in Armenia and people would not have to look  for it in other countries.    

Bojolyan's family also had big hopes with the European Court but on November 3, 2009 the European Court dismissed Bojolyan's claim.

"During these 8 years we were convinced that there is no justice in Armenia and the European Court was our only hope. I was waiting only for a not guilty verdict,' said Murad Bojolyan's wife while talking to us.

"The European Court does not solve the issue of guilt, so we had not applied to the court with such formulation - to recognize Murad Bojolyan not guilty. We had applied insisting that Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights had been violated because there had been illegal and inadequate intervention into his rights. This was our formulation. The European Court rejected to accept our claim with its verdict. The vote was not unanimous, the decision was made by the majority of votes," Araik Ghazaryan said to us after the EC decision.

The lawyer says that the European Court resolution cannot be appealed, since it is "a decision on acceptance. True, it has adopted a decision taking into account the essence of the case but the procedure does not allow an appeal. If this was a verdict we could appeal to the Great Palace."    

The Court has decided that the information Murad Bojolyan had passed to the Turkish MIT (secret service) was not a state secret but that according to the facts in the case he had passed other information.

"That is, even if the information is not state secret, just passing it to a foreign special services is enough basis for state bodies to interfere and convict the person," explains the lawyer.

The fact that Bojolyan was a reporter in this case was less important because he was not convicted as a reporter who performed his responsibilities but exclusively for passing the information to a foreign secret service. 

If verdicts of national court said that Murad Bojolyan passed information to Turkish reporters and not to special services, then, according to Ghazaryan, the decision would have been different.

"The status of European Court does not allow it to independently search evidence and present it. It studies the evidence presented to it."

Murad Bojolyan is in prison since January 2002. Bojolyan's wife, Lyudmila Bojolyan, says they will continue their fight for justice.  

Bojolyan is the first citizen of independent Armenia convicted for high treason. According to the bill of indictment, Bojolyan was recruited by Turkish intelligence and passed to the Turkish side secret information, military information about Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh for financial compensation.

"Murad Bojolyan was sentenced to 10 years of imprisonment without any evidence. The verdict was a sentence not only for Murad Bojolyan but also for all members of his family. The label of traitor of Motherland was stamped also on us, we have been living with it already for 8 years," Murad Bojolyan's wife said to us.   

It should be mentioned that in 16 months Murad Bojolyan's imprisonment period comes to an end. His family says that his many appeals for an early release have been rejected without any grounds.   

Zhanna Aleksanyan