Another Important Victory by the Legal Team of "ELL Partnership"

Senior Associate and Attorney of the firm Gohar Avagyan, Associate and Attorney Volodya Mazmanyan, and Associate and Assistant Attorney Alvina Vardanyan have recorded an important victory in civil case No. ED2/4044/02/24 at the Court of General Jurisdiction of the City of Yerevan, regarding the claim to publicly refute factual data considered defamation and to compensate for non-pecuniary damage caused to honor and dignity.

The judgment rendered by the Court is not only of essential significance for us and our client but is also important in the context of shaping judicial practice for similar cases in the Republic of Armenia. It serves as a significant benchmark, particularly from the perspective of interpreting legal approaches regarding the selection of the proper defendant and the application of the statute of limitations.

In defamation cases, the proper selection of the defendant is of essential significance. In practice, a question sometimes arises: should the defendant be the legal entity or the physical person, when the person making defamatory statements acts on behalf of the legal entity? Our firm's legal team substantiated that in this case, public statements of a defamatory nature were made by the Defendant's ex officio representative, the Rector, which were directly directed at the Plaintiff's person with the aim of tarnishing the latter's honor and dignity. Furthermore, when making these statements, the latter acted on behalf of the Institute itself; therefore, the proper defendant is the Institute, which was confirmed by the Court.

The other essential circumstance in the case concerned the issue of applying the statute of limitations. The Defendant argued that statements identical in content made between the parties during 2024 should be assessed as circumstances triggering the limitation period and that the Plaintiff had missed the procedural deadlines for filing the claim. However, as a result of a comprehensive examination of the factual circumstances of the case and the combination of the substantiated positions of our legal team, the Court recorded that within the framework of the principle of dispositiveness, the Plaintiff was entitled to apply to the court even in the case where the defamatory statements were of a continuous and repetitive nature. Since a number of statements were repeated in 2025, which had already been partially qualified as defamatory, the Court concluded that the Plaintiff lawfully initiated the protection of her rights, utilizing her principle of dispositiveness and effective means of judicial protection. With this approach, the Court essentially answered the legal question according to which: if statements of a defamatory nature are of a continuous and repetitive nature, then the statute of limitations for each instance begins to run from the moment of making that specific statement, and not in continuity.

We congratulate "ELL Partnership" Law Firm on another significant victory recorded in judicial practice and express our gratitude to our client Lusine Stepanyan for entrusting the protection of her rights and interests to our company.