Prosecutor Hayk Avetyan requested that Edgar Ghazaryan, a member of parliament from the Strong Armenia faction, be sentenced to two years and six months in prison, with an additional penalty barring him from engaging in public activities for three years. He also asked that the current preventive measure remain in place until the judicial act becomes final, Panorama.am reported. Ghazaryan’s lawyer, Ruben Melikyan, said the prosecutor was seeking an excessively harsh punishment. He said he had not found a comparable case in judicial practice in which the maximum punishment had been imposed. Melikyan argued that granting the prosecutor’s request would amount to isolating political opponents. Ruben Melikyan said they would appeal the verdict. The court retired to deliberate, with the verdict expected to be announced in about an hour. Earlier, Ghazaryan wrote on his Facebook page that he was “being tried for speech.” “Today at 4:00 p.m., in the same courthouse that was blockaded by Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan on May 20, 2019, a verdict is due that will determine my future political and personal fate. I am being tried for speech — speech made in connection with the Constitutional Court’s decision on the regulations governing the Armenian and Azerbaijani border commissions, which to this day have not carried out even one millimeter of delimitation,” he wrote.