Parade of Bills
The State-Church Round Table has functioned in Kyiv on a regular basis for some years, focusing on Ukrainian churches as institutions of civil society, their rights and guarantees by the state, and whether those churches will be subject to the law or government-run entities. The round table has a permanent circle of guests — heads and representatives of the twelve largest Christian churches (of 105 officially registered churches, confessions, and religious movements), people’s deputies, scholars, and members of the government. In view of the role played by the churches in public life and the increasing number of people considering themselves believers (almost 58% according to the latest polls), the importance and urgency of the issues discussed is beyond dispute.
Among the round table organizers are the Oleksandr Razumkov Ukrainian Center for Economic and Political Research, State Committee for Religions, and Ukrainian office of the Konrad Adenauer Foundation (an outreach project of the German Christian Democratic Party — Ed.). The latter not only finances the round table meetings, but also tries to share with the Ukrainian clergy the experience of effective cooperation among different churches and confessions in Germany, specially in terms of social work. The latest session on October 23 paid most attention to the bills on the freedom of conscience and changes in existing law.
In fact, the first sitting on June 23, 1996 dealt with the same subject: Ukrainian legislation in church-state relations and ways to improve it. The next five years saw the discussion remain practically in the same vein, without any changes agreed upon, debates, historical digressions, reports by noted Western clergymen (invited by Dr. Manfred Loman, head of the Adenauer Ukrainian office) notwithstanding. Currently the process has entered a new phase, working out bills on the freedom of conscience and regulation of religious activities en masse. The texts are written by lawmakers, the State Committee for Religions, and even by individual churches. Most such bills have one thing in common, being adjusted to reductions in the overall freedom of conscience in Ukraine, while enhancing the rights of one given church to the detriment of the rest.
A graphic example is the UOC Moscow Patriarchate’s legislative initiative when (Moscow’s) Metropolitan Volodymyr of Kyiv and All Ukraine recently declared that his patriarchate was preparing its own bill On the Freedom of Conscience and Religious Organizations soon to be submitted for deliberation. Its preamble stresses “the special role of canonical Orthodoxy in the history of Ukraine.” This is perhaps the first historical document or legal instrument to use Orthodoxy preceded by the adjective canonical; strangely, the authors seem to have overlooked mentioning Ukrainian Orthodoxy as not autocephalous but part of the Russian Orthodox Church. Undoubtedly, other churches will promptly follow suit jointly with allied political parties, producing their own versions of the law on religion. Indeed, too much is at stake: immovable property, land, church businesses, influence on education, the army, the state — in a word, society.
It is hard to say when we might expect the new bill to be passed. Even now the round table participants are concerned about its implementation and how to legislatively secure its effectiveness. After all, the current freedom of conscience law has its advantages, considered one of the most democratic legislative acts in the postcommunist world. In addition, several useful presidential edicts were signed, badly needed by all churches, but local authorities adhere to their own “laws,” registering only the churches they like, allocating plots only to “friendly” religions, leaving the others to knock on countless office doors for years on end, bringing their grievances to court only to confront their own adaptation of the traditional Soviet class approach.
There is no denying the fact that churches are also to blame for the situation that has developed; they seldom show interfaith solidarity; they do not protest religious discrimination unless it affects them. An example is the latest round table, when a ranking government official did not like what one of the bishops had to say and simply gave the clergyman a dressing-down despite protocol. And nothing happened afterward; none of the other clergymen present objected to such an indiscretion.
I am certain that if any of the churches imposed a public penance on even one local official, even if for a minor wrongdoing, the overall picture would change. As it is, even the best law is not likely to change much.
