Law Dept: Biased members of Expert Commission on UOC Statute must be removed

On January 10, 2022, a meeting of the expert group was held to conduct a religious examination of the Statute on the management of the UOC. It was attended by the head of the Legal Department, Archpriest Alexander Bakhov, as a representative of the group from the UOC with the blessing of His Beatitude Metropolitan Onuphry of Kyiv and All Ukraine. Following the meeting, the Legal Department of the UOC published a statement on the removal of biased experts from the commission.

These included Ihor Kozlovsky, Oleksandr Sagan, Liudmyla Filipovich and Yuri Chornomorets.

Substantiating his position, the head of the Legal Department pointed out a conflict of interest and an immediate interest of these persons in the result of this examination.

“It is a well-known fact that some members of the Expert Group are not only parishioners of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, but also show bias and hostility towards the UOC, which has been repeatedly published in social networks and the media,” Father Alexander emphasized.

The priest recalled that on the air of the Espresso TV channel in December 2022, Ihor Kozlovsky insisted on the speedy adoption of a bill to ban the UOC.

“Oleksandr Sagan is one of the active opponents of the UOC, a long-term teacher at the theological academy of the UOC-KP, now the OCU. In the media and social networks, Facebook, he expresses bias and hostility towards the UOC, for example, in his Facebook post dated November 29, 2022: "...immediately limit the anti-Ukrainian possibilities of the UOC-MP (Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine). First of all, this is about the immediate termination of all agreements on the lease of real estate (state and municipal), all other agreements, since these religions organizations have lost the status of a legal entity." Furthermore, in his Facebook publication of December 10, 2022, he claims that the Security Service of Ukraine should apply tougher measures against representatives of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, ignoring the presumption of innocence,” the statement says.

The head of the legal department of the UOC also draws attention to the statements of Yuri Chornomorets, in which he directly calls the Ukrainian Orthodox Church a propaganda strain of the “UOC FSB”, calls for the deportation of the entire episcopate and the destruction of the structure itself.

The statement says that Liudmyla Filipovich is also among the main opponents of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church.

“In the comments published by the RISU website dated December 4, 2022, she directly indicates the path along which the liquidation of the UOC will be carried out – at the level of individual parishes. Filipovich also believes that the UOC is a ‘quasi-religion’, which is not really a religious structure. In addition, she supports the law on renaming religious organizations and believes to the effect that it should be applied specifically to the UOC,” the document says.

“In order to conduct an objective and impartial religious examination of the Statute on the governance of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, I ask you to involve experts who do not have a biased and hostile attitude towards the UOC, as well as religious experts from international scientific institutions,” says the statement of the representative of the UOC in the Expert Group to the State Service of Ukraine on Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience.

As the UOJ reported, the Legal Department stated that breaking the lease agreement for the Upper Lavra churches with the UOC is illegal and there are no grounds for banning the UOC from holding services in these churches.