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CE commissioner for human rights for granting legal identity status to canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Moscow, January 15, Interfax - Council of Europe’s Human Rights Thomas Hammarberg has spoken in support of the canonical Orthodox Church in Ukraine.

‘We cannot imagine that there should be people deprived of rights in one of the leading countries in Europe in the 21st century. The life and work of the Church should be necessarily formalized legally. It should not only own its property without problems but also enjoy guarantees of protection of its rights as both a community and individual believers’, he said in a talk with the primate of the Ukrainian Church, Metropolitan Vladimir, in December in Kiev, the website of the Russian Orthodox Church representation in Strasbourg has reported.

The metropolitan, on his part, drew the commissioner’s attention to the fact that the Ukrainian Church had not have the status of legal identity since Ukraine declared its independence - which generated numerous problems, and one of them was that the Church could not own property on legal grounds. Metropolitan Vladimir also noted that about 900 subjects of church property were used for other than ecclesiastical purposes while the churches that were returned to the Church were difficult to register as church property and heavy taxes were levied on churches and monasteries.

The head of the Church also pointed to the problems arisen from the church division. He said that ‘the principal trouble is not even that many went over to the schismatics in 1992 but that this problem still remains unsolved on legislative level. As a result, any man can put on church vestments today and claim to be a metropolitan and even a patriarch’.

Another problem, he said, is that the state has permitted the fallen-away Orthodox communities to celebrate in churches belonging to the canonical Church in turns with its own clergy.

The commissioner and the metropolitan also discussed the failure of local authorities to execute in good time court decisions for returning property to the Church and to introduce without delay the Basic Christian Ethics in school curriculum in some regions, as well as the state’s reluctance to grant recognition to theological education.

The Chancellor of the Ukrainian Church, Archbishop Mitrofan of Pereyaslav-Khmelnitsky, who also took part in the talk, expressed hope that being familiarized with the status of the Orthodox in the country, Commissioner Hammarberg ‘will help make Ukraine to fulfill the commitments it assumed when it expressed its desire to join the Council of Europe’.

‘Now there is a hope that these problems will be solved shortly... We hope this meeting will give Ukraine a stimulus to put in order its legislation on religion and to give the Church an opportunity for carrying out its mission in a broader and more constructive way’, the hierarch said.

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