There have been several cases that the oligarchs, the second president of Armenia Robert Kocharyan apply to the court with a demand to restore their humiliated honor and good reputation. And their reputation is humiliated not because of the internal tough situation in the country, low economy and politics, which is mainly the fault of the oligarchs but because of what the newspapers write about them. At any rate, the Russian media sources have presented quite serious accusations addressed to our political and economic elite. The latter were accused of corruption, direct robbery of the country, becoming rich by illegal methods but none of the oligarchs ever applied to the court to get a moral retribution of the humiliations and offence. Wikileaks publicized the views of the former US Ambassador to Armenia John Evans and the current US Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch about the Armenian reality, the behavior of our police and high-rank officials. And as usual none of the governments felt offended; nobody’s dignity was humiliated. It turns out that only the Armenian can morally offend the Armenian. It turns out that the Armenian has the courage to demand moral retribution only from local sources. And even the sharpest criticism of the foreign sources are considered by us as efforts to notice our miserable and pathetic existence, for which we are even covertly thankful. So Armenian officials and oligarchs get offended when the reality is published in Armenian. Why? Perhaps the reason is that the potential voters so far mostly read in Armenian. The problem is that the contempt of Armenians against each other has two radical expressions. There are officials, who don’t care about the public opinion even when journalists write the most obnoxious things about them. In other cases they become really picky and demanding even a single word that humiliates or insults them. The justification of applying to the court is that the articles published in the media flaw their name and their business reputation. In other words the newspapers morally damage them. Moral harm implies mental suffering, fury and material inconveniencies. So it is not hard to assume that moral damage has its concrete material equivalent – several million drams. Judging from the current reality only the ones, who have quite wealth and reputation according to Armenian standards, can demand and receive moral compensation. These people are vulnerable if you wish as a social group. They are sensitive to insults. Back in the day when it was the function of the criminal code to regulate the cases of moral damage the paid amount was directed to the state budget. According to the civil code the plaintiff determines the amount of the moral damage and who is eligible to manage the money the way he/she wishes. When the oligarchs are suing a newspaper, as the precedents show, they don’t have the objective to restore their reputation. They have the objective to financially damage the given newspaper. Otherwise the published retraction should have calmed the insulted oligarchs. But no they demand several million drams. This is the amount of the humiliated reputation. The allegations that this money is going to be directed to the orphanages, are not convincing at all. If you are doing benevolence at the expense of others, by damaging the others for the good of others, it cannot be considered charity. We cannot deny the fact that in media one can often find references or observations, which insult people. I can bring up a concrete and a fresh example. When Raffi Hovhannisian shaved his beard in the media and elsewhere we could find articles, which came to prove that the authors have a really good upbringing and are very impolite in their interpretations. But they were sure that they wouldn’t be sued for their bad upbringing. The observation of the director of Internews Manana Aslamazyan is not groundless, who claims that often because of the lack of facts and evidence the newspapers get to insult the given politician. Let us not hide that each media outlet has its preferences and antipathy to this or other politician. But the problem doesn’t require a local solution. The courts, government, NA, Constitutional Court, law-enforcement system, TV, media and other institutes are bodies, which work with the same principles but have different targets. They all know each other’s flaws very well but struggle against the flaws in a selective manner. When the oligarch or a high-rank statesman are seeking their merits and dignities in the local media they perfectly know what their party counterparts, colleagues and average citizens thinks about them. Those are definitely not good words. They call each other with much worse adjectives. Therefore, it is philosophy to feel discomfort when what others think about you is publicized. If you had broad horizon, correct interpretation of the reality you would never apply to the court with an expectation for moral compensation. In court, what is considered insult is kind of legalized. And even a question comes up, “Was the retribution moral or as Serzh Sargsyan would say, amoral?”
