The UN Human Rights Office published a report on discrimination against the UOC
The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has published a report on freedom of religion in Ukraine, in which it drew attention to discrimination against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), the website of the Department for External Church Relations of the Moscow Patriarchate reports.
“We are talking about discriminatory measures against the UOC, as well as expressing concern that the application of the so-called security measures of the SBU against the UOC is expressed. Thus, the SBU conducted searches (some of them called “security measures”) in several monasteries, offices, educational institutions and other property of the UOC in Kiev, Rivne, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Dnepropetrovsk, Khmelnytsky, Cherkasy, Volyn, Kherson , Ternopil, Poltava and Transcarpathian regions,” the document says.
It notes that in some cases, SBU officers interrogated priests using a polygraph.
“The SBU confirmed that the clergy of the UOC were issued at least three suspicions for violating the equality of citizens on the basis of race, nationality, religion, disability or other grounds, as well as one on a variety of charges, including infringement on the territorial integrity and inviolability of Ukraine. Two suspects are under round-the-clock house arrest”, the Moscow Patriarchate website quotes the report.
And while reports are being published at the UN, in Kyiv, the Ukrainian police checked the passports of all the people who came to the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra for the last Sunday prayer before the expulsion of the monks. But, despite this, there were a lot of parishioners.
“The entrance was with passports, but there were still a lot of people,” said one of the interlocutors of the agency. The second specified that the documents were checked by law enforcement officers. “The police checked, they looked at passports,” parishioners said in an interview with a Russian agency.
According to him, they prayed “so that reason would prevail among people,” so that there would be no persecution of the Orthodox Church.
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