A protest leader in Armenia has called for more anti-government protests against a controversial border demarcation agreement with Azerbaijan.
Archbishop Bagrat Galstanian, the leader of the Tavush Diocese of the Armenian Apostolic Church, said during a gathering in Yerevan in the evening of May 13 that "the pressure should increase" on the government.
The gathering was held at the end of a day of "civil disobedience" campaigns called for by the archbishop in the Armenian capital that resulted in the detention of 171 protesters. They were all released later.
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Armenian Archbishop Leads Fresh Protests Pressing For PM's Resignation
Law enforcement authorities told RFE/RL that those detained had failed to comply with police orders.
The protesters blocked several streets and demanded the resignation of Prime Minister Nikol Pashinian.
Rallies against the government have been held for weeks in protest against the border deal.
Under the border-demarcation deal with Baku, Armenia cedes control of four villages that were part of Azerbaijan during the Soviet era, but which have been controlled by Armenia since the 1990s.
The United States and the European Union have hailed the deal, but the Pashinian government has been accused by opposition politicians of giving up territory to Azerbaijan with no guarantees.
Pashinian has said the unilateral concessions are necessary to prevent Azerbaijani military aggression against Armenia. The Armenian opposition maintains he is encouraging Baku to demand more territory from Armenia and to use force for that purpose.
Armenia agreed to the handover as the initial step in defining the frontier between the two rival South Caucasus countries.
Armenia and Azerbaijan have fought two wars in the last three decades over the region of Nagorno-Karabakh, which had been a majority ethnic Armenian enclave since the Soviet collapse and is internationally recognized as Azerbaijani territory.
The region initially came under the control of ethnic Armenian forces, backed by the Armenian military, in separatist fighting that ended in 1994.
In 2020, Azerbaijan took back parts of Nagorno-Karabakh along with seven surrounding districts that Armenian forces had claimed during the earlier conflict.
After Baku took full control over the region as the result of a one-day military operation in September last year, nearly 100,000 ethnic Armenians fled Nagorno-Karabakh to Armenia.