RUSSIAN CHURCH CALLS ON OSCE TO STRENGTHEN MONITORING OF
RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM IN UKRAINE
Interfax-Religiia,
2 April 2019
A representative of the Moscow patriarchate called for
expanding the
mandate of the OSCE monitoring mission in Ukraine in the
direction of
collecting information about violations of religious liberty.
"We have received information about numerous violations
of the
rights of believers of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church," the
vice-chairman
of the synod's Department for Relations of Church with Society
and News Media,
Vakhtang Kipshidze, declared at a conference of the OSCE in
Austria.
In his opinion, it is necessary to expand the mandate of
the Special
Monitoring Mission of the OSCE in Ukraine in such a way so that
it would
collect and present to the international community incidents of
numerous
violations of religious liberty by the authorities of Ukraine.
V. Kipshidze also recalled that in 2014 the Venice
commission approved
the "guiding principles relative to the legal standing of
religious
communities," earlier developed by the Bureau for Democratic
Institutions
and Human Rights.
"These principles speak of the obligations of the state,
while
granting the status of legal entity to religious communities, to
ensure the
legal possibility of resolving thereby issues about their
leadership, internal
rules, structure of a community, and methods of appointing
clergy, and also
about their name," the representative of the RPTs recalled.
He also called attention to the fact that the so-called law about renaming, adopted in Ukraine, in the most blatant way violated the "guiding principles" and should have a legal evaluation by the Venice commission, especially in light of the threats to deprive the Ukrainian church of the rights of legal entity which were heard from the developer of this "discriminatory law," Rada Deputy Viktor Elensky. (tr. by PDS, posted 2 April 2019)
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