Yurash: The law on renaming is not blocked, UOC just ignores it

Andrei Yurash. Photo: uacrisis.org

The law on the forced renaming of the UOC is not blocked by the court and is in force, and it is necessary “to motivate religious organizations to ensure that they comply with this rule of law”. This was stated in an interview with Glavkom by Andrei Yurash, who seeks to secure the post of head of the State Service for Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience.

According to him, Ukrainian legislation does not have the right to give the Ukrainian Orthodox Church any new name, "it only obliges it to indicate its religious center in its name".

“According to this legislation, the term expired on October 26 when religious organizations, indicated in the expert opinion of the Ministry of Culture, were obliged to change the name,” the official said. “Thus, if these communities or institutions have not changed their name, they will lose it, and in this situation we must motivate religious organizations to comply with this rule of law.”

He noted that it is incorrect to consider the law on renaming the Church blocked, since it can lose its force only after the relevant decision of the Constitutional Court.

“There is a submission by 49 deputies to the Constitutional Court demanding that this law be declared unconstitutional. The COP has not yet made a decision,” Yurash said.

At the same time, he clarified that the Ministry of Culture really could not perform registration actions in relation to a number of religious organizations: “In order to prevent the Ministry of Culture from taking any actions in relation to these religious organizations, 265 of them were included as a third party in the lawsuit of the Kiev Metropolis of the UOC. It is really impossible to perform any actions regarding them (these are monasteries, diocesan administrations, church missions), since they appear as a third party, so the court per se prohibited any actions prior to the decision.”

Thus, the official emphasized, the law was suspended only in relation to 265 organizations mentioned, “but the law is valid for those 12 thousand communities that belong to the UOC in unity with the MP,” however, the UOC “simply does not want” to comply with these norms of the law.

“The Church, which is in unity with the Moscow Patriarchate, simply does not want to do this, ignoring the relevant provisions of the law. But ignoring the law does not exempt from liability for its failure,” concluded the ex-head of the Department of the Ministry of Culture for Religious Affairs.

As reported by the UOJ, earlier the Ministry of Culture said that in the near future they would come back to renaming the UOC.

Recall that on November 21, 2019, Andrei Yurash, one of the main lobbyists of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine (OCU), failed the final stage of the competition for the post of head of the State Service of Ukraine on Ethnic Policy and Freedom of Conscience, established on the basis of the Department for Religious Affairs. On December 3, Yurash announced that the Cabinet of Ministers had officially started a new contest for this position and he intended to take part in it again.

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