Human rights defenders discuss facts of violations of UOC rights with OSCE

On April 24, 2017, the delegation OSCE SMM officials headed by Mr. Mark Kirschbaum met with the head of NGO "Public Advocacy" Oleg Denisov. The meeting was attended by NGO advisor on media issues, cleric of the UOC, priest Alexiy Zoshchuk, reports a UOJ correspondent.

The sides discussed issues of interfaith conflicts and legislative regulation of the state-Church relationship. Human rights defenders expressed concern over the continuing violations of the rights of believers and communities of the UOC, the facts of searches of journalists and human rights defenders in the Rivne region, ongoing blocking of UOC services in the church of Ptycha and other previously seized temples, as well as the lack of results of the investigations of criminal proceedings opened earlier on application by the representatives of the UOC communities.

The OSCE representatives were informed of the interaction of the NGO "Public Advocaсy" with the United Nations Universal Periodic Review System of the Human Rights Council, which will consider the issue of Ukraine's compliance with international legal standards in 2017.

The parties also discussed the possibility of holding a dialogue with representatives of various levels of government, public and religious organizations in connection with the problems of blocking registration of changes to the statutes of religious organizations of the UOC, conflict situations on religious ground and aggressive rhetoric about the UOC in the media.

In addition, the meeting participants considered aspects of the correlation of state and legal regulation models in various countries of the world in relation to the problems of Ukraine, in particular regarding the issue of observing the right of religious organizations to legally fix their canonical governance structure in statutory documents.

In particular, the experience of the US Orthodox Church was mentioned, whose statute provides for the existence of two categories of community members, one of which has the right to vote at community meetings, and the other one has no voting rights; as well as the legal practice of the Republic of Lithuania, whose legislation grants the right to the ruling bishop alone to create and liquidate the community, and the general assembly in the Orthodox religious organizations is non-existent as such.

In connection with the above, human rights defenders expressed concern over the imposition on the religious communities of Ukraine of a ban on the formulation in the statutes of restrictions aimed at protecting the community from seizures and legal violations.

Let us recall that earlier the Ministry of Culture sent an informative letter to the regional state administrations, in which it unreasonably forbade the registration of statutes containing any items limiting the right of believers to change the canonical subordination.

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