MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 18th December, 2018) The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is likely to support the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP) should the sides of the religious crisis in Ukraine refer to the court, Vakhtang Kipshidze, the deputy chairman of the Russian Orthodox Church's Synodal Department for the Relations with Society and Mass Media, said on Monday.
Kipshidze's statement follows the "unification council," which was held in Kiev on Saturday and during which Epiphany Dumenko, Metropolitan of Pereyaslavsky and Bila Tserkva of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Kyiv Patriarchate (UOC-KP), was elected primate of the "new Ukrainian church." According to Ukrainian media, only two bishops of the canonical UOC-MP participated in the council. The UOC-MP refused to participate in this event.
"What happens there [in Ukraine] demonstrates a completely unacceptable intervention of the state in the affairs of the church ... No court ... will ever recognize the state's right to create religious communities based on the political situation ... Even the European Court of Human Rights is likely to support the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, headed by Metropolitan Onufriy [of Kiev and all Ukraine] because it has the autonomy ... from such interventions," Kipshidze said at a round table discussion in Moscow.
On Saturday, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) said the canonical meaning of the "council" in Kiev was insignificant, and the possibility of recognizing Epiphany in the Orthodox world was a task "hardly possible to fulfill."
The UOC-MP said on Sunday that it refused to recognize the "new church" created at the "unification council" and supported by the Constantinople Patriarchate.
