Why International Institutions Overlook the Persecution of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church?

Violated rights of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the Ukrainian government is accompanied by disruptions in the international system of whistleblowing, given the obvious threats to religious freedom in Ukraine. The footage of church seizures and rampage in monasteries has become viral the world over, courtesy of social networks. Yet the organizations, which have been mobilizing the public outcry against inroads upon religious freedom during several recent decades, strangely keep silent at a time when the rights of Orthodox believers in Ukraine are trampled underfoot. The government agencies lack sufficient resolve to condemn Kiev’s religious policy. Finally, when Russia raises this issue at the UN Security Council, referring to the UN Charter and expressing concern over the problems faced by its Christian Orthodox brethren, whose rights are violated, other Security Council members insist that whatever is transpiring in Ukraine is a mere reaction to the Special Military Operation (SMO) rather than a consistent policy Kiev has been pursuing for many years already.    

How can it be explained that in the area of the UOC rights, international organizations that are called to blow a whistle and redress human rights violations officially operate in the observer capacity, as their activities are limited to mere monitoring? We are far from interpreting whatever transpires in our full view by resorting to conspiracy theories of external pressure exerted on those international bodies. After all, among the employees of international organizations and activists of human rights watchdogs there are people who have dealt with injustices in different parts of the world at their own risk. They are better aware than anyone else that the “democratic regime of Ukraine” rhetoric has nothing to do with reality. The situation is complicated by the fact that what is happening to the UOC is not caused by a border interstate conflict, but by domestic problems. Besides, there is no oppression of an ethnic or religious minority here, because the UOC is the majority church. But most important is that the current escalation is taking place during the wartime. It is logical that international bodies do not want to hear any appeals from Russia, which is seen as one of the parties to the military conflict, which started the aggression and is guilty by default. That is why public organizations and experts abstain from hasty assessments of what is happening to church communities during the military confrontation, limiting themselves to remarks about “hate-speech” or about “the future restoration of Ukraine,” which will also include instructions on proper state-church relations.

But there are also deeper reasons. In our opinion, the very system of addressing religion-related issues in contemporary international law has many shortcomings at the current stage of development. Until recently, international organizations positioned themselves as emphatically secular, and the problems of violence or violations of religious rights were addressed within the framework of other topics – the rights of national minorities and the preservation of cultural heritage. Issues related to the plight of religious organizations have been an important part of many peace negotiations, but they were usually discussed behind the scenes. In the second half of the 20th century, when two members of the Security Council (the USSR and the PRC) were communist atheist regimes and France was an emphatically secular state with a tradition of anticlericalism, this was natural. A fundamental turnaround in the attitude towards religion in public discourse is thought to have occurred after the events of September 2001, at which time the active involvement of religious organizations in UN diplomacy commenced. However, many works of the 1990s, including Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, which astonished the global academia at the time by references to religious themes, were a precursor to this turnaround.

Ways to overcome the problems of expertise and increase the effectiveness of protecting human rights pertaining to religious freedom:

1. The politically biased criticism of religious freedom issues should inevitably be met with symmetrical responses, expression of concerns about the rights of believers in other countries outside Russia, following the example of the U.S. Commission Report. However, such mirror measures generally appear to be ineffective.
2. Create multilateral religious expertise within the framework of regional fora in Eurasia and friendly countries.
3. Build healthy relations in protecting the rights related to international religious freedom, it is fundamentally important to ignore the assessments of organizations and fora created without Russian experts involved.
4. At the current stage of socio-political development, it is obvious that the destruction of national theological education makes the country more vulnerable and creates problems for state sovereignty in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to increase domestic expertise by creating more jobs for the few theologians/religionists, supporting theological education and research initiatives aimed at critical examination of Western religious concepts in social sciences.
5. While recognizing that the military conflict leaves little room for improvement in the realm of Ukrainian Orthodox Church rights, it is nevertheless necessary to testify that a wait-and-see silence increases the risks.
6. Freedom of religion is a universal legal value, and so politicization and discrimination against this fundamental right does not contribute to stable development and peace.

Violated rights of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the Ukrainian government is accompanied by disruptions in the international system of whistleblowing, given the obvious threats to religious freedom in Ukraine. The footage of church seizures and rampage in monasteries has become viral the world over, courtesy of social networks. Yet the organizations, which have been mobilizing the public outcry against inroads upon religious freedom during several recent decades, strangely keep silent at a time when the rights of Orthodox believers in Ukraine are trampled underfoot. The government agencies lack sufficient resolve to condemn Kiev’s religious policy. Finally, when Russia raises this issue at the UN Security Council, referring to the UN Charter and expressing concern over the problems faced by its Christian Orthodox brethren, whose rights are violated, other Security Council members insist that whatever is transpiring in Ukraine is a mere reaction to the Special Military Operation (SMO) rather than a consistent policy Kiev has been pursuing for many years already.

All this causes a déjà vu effect. As if we have travelled back in time to the mid-19th century, when Russia tried to defend the rights of its co-religionists – Christians in Eastern Europe – in the territory of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, while other great powers, ignoring religious arguments, explained the Russian foreign policy by selfish expansion motives. Meanwhile, their own expansion in the Middle East and their agreements with Istanbul always prioritized economic rather than humanitarian goals, although these were accompanied by outreach activity. All this led to huge casualties in the two initial decades of the 20th century. One could say that such an outcome was inevitable in that era because states, in the absence of developed institutions of international law, having no mechanism of co-operation, were doomed to blind competition. But even with the emergence of the League of Nations, little changed; Orthodoxy remained an unfamiliar “other” of the Eurocentric world.

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How can it be explained that in the area of the UOC rights, international organizations that are called to blow a whistle and redress human rights violations officially operate in the observer capacity, as their activities are limited to mere monitoring? We are far from interpreting whatever transpires in our full view by resorting to conspiracy theories of external pressure exerted on those international bodies. After all, among the employees of international organizations and activists of human rights watchdogs there are people who have dealt with injustices in different parts of the world at their own risk. They are better aware than anyone else that the “democratic regime of Ukraine” rhetoric has nothing to do with reality. The situation is complicated by the fact that what is happening to the UOC is not caused by a border interstate conflict, but by domestic problems. Besides, there is no oppression of an ethnic or religious minority here, because the UOC is the majority church. But most important is that the current escalation is taking place during the wartime. It is logical that international bodies do not want to hear any appeals from Russia, which is seen as one of the parties to the military conflict, which started the aggression and is guilty by default. That is why public organizations and experts abstain from hasty assessments of what is happening to church communities during the military confrontation, limiting themselves to remarks about “hate-speech” or about “the future restoration of Ukraine,” which will also include instructions on proper state-church relations.

But there are also deeper reasons. In our opinion, the very system of addressing religion-related issues in contemporary international law has many shortcomings at the current stage of development. Until recently, international organizations positioned themselves as emphatically secular, and the problems of violence or violations of religious rights were addressed within the framework of other topics – the rights of national minorities and the preservation of cultural heritage. Issues related to the plight of religious organizations have been an important part of many peace negotiations, but they were usually discussed behind the scenes. In the second half of the 20th century, when two members of the Security Council (the USSR and the PRC) were communist atheist regimes and France was an emphatically secular state with a tradition of anticlericalism, this was natural. A fundamental turnaround in the attitude towards religion in public discourse is thought to have occurred after the events of September 2001, at which time the active involvement of religious organizations in UN diplomacy commenced. However, many works of the 1990s, including Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations, which astonished the global academia at the time by references to religious themes, were a precursor to this turnaround. The 2006 book by Madeleine Albright on religious diplomacy [1] might be symbolic of this “pivot”.

Let us highlight the problems of discussing religion-related issues in international organizations.

1) These organizations lack sufficient bureaucracy and infrastructure to obtain their own information on religious freedom, so they process such issues using their own analytical strategies, and on a planetary scale to boot. They rely on information received from states and NGOs, including religious ones. The information they receive is implicitly imbibed with the views of informants; moreover, it is selected and spun by officials for specific procedures and speeches, that gives rise to the selectivity of conclusions phenomenon. Of all the non-international organizations dealing with religious freedom, the largest is the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF), established in the system of U.S. government’s foreign policy agencies in 1998. The reports of this Commission (on which most NGOs around the world rely in the absence of other alternatives for completeness and systematization of their materials) are ridden by the same nuisance – selectivity and lack of common criteria for assessing the scale of events. Hence the same risks of favoritism, not in the sense of corruption, but as an inevitable characteristic of governance in the pre-bureaucratic era. It is at this stage, seemingly reminiscent of the favoritism of the XVII-XVIII centuries, that attempts at global religion management are being made nowadays. In assessing certain phenomena, great attention under this approach is paid to the presence of decorative democratism rhetoric, its pro-Western forms, and whether there is a rapprochement with the countries observed in U.S. foreign policy. For example, the Report on International Religious Freedom 2022 describes situations in different countries in very different terms and does not even strive for abstract uniformity. The only topic that is described more or less symmetrically across all countries is anti-Semitism. Otherwise, for each country, the 2022 Report offers a predominant theme, such as religious education in schools for the UK, “indoctrination” of religious leaders with state ideology for China, and mutual accusations between the SBU (Security Service of Ukraine), the UOC, and the OCU (The Orthodox Church of Ukraine) – for Ukraine. The destruction of churches in the course of the Russian SMO (The 2022 Report mentions only the artillery used by the Russian Armed Forces) raises a lot more fears among the authors of the Report than street battles between Hindus, Muslims and Christians in India, with numerous homicide cases (which the Indian government itself views as social rather than religious conflicts). The scope of event assessment changes all the time, because it clearly plays an ancillary role: to bring whatever is necessary into closer focus and to hold off whatever is not needed. That said, internally, the United States is a nation governed by the rule of law, which does not allow the kinds of discrimination against its citizens, at which it winks in its foreign policy.

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2) As the experience of the previous century shows, the best real protection of rights for a religious organization is provided on the national and regional levels, not internationally. It is in this sequence (agreement with national authorities, then with regional supranational cooperation bodies, and only afterwards – recognition of significance at the international level) that the “historic” churches of Europe secure their rights nowadays. Even for the Vatican, with its international status, the question of a treaty with the state of Italy and subsequent participation in the European security system (OSCE) was of fundamental importance. In creating this system, the Catholic Church was an active actor, not just a beneficiary. Currently, the Vatican has its own Religious Freedom Report (RFR) to guide Catholic organizations. Setting eyes on the example of Western denominations as its diplomatic partners in the second half of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church embarked upon a similar path, opening its representative offices at European international organizations in Strasbourg and Brussels. However, no serious exchange came out of it; the dialogue ended, having barely begun, because its political prerequisite was Russia’s hope for partnership relations with Europe in the 1990s-2000s (with the approval of the United States). It would seem that Ukraine is promised European integration, but then why did the appeals of Ukrainian Orthodox Christians to the OSCE bring no result? We see the reasons in the fact that, firstly, the European religious logic is focused on pluralism, recognized by the Congress of Westphalia in 1648. This pluralism encompasses selected confessions (Catholicism, Lutheranism and Calvinism). [2] With the EU enlargement, the Orthodox nations of the Balkan Peninsula came within the scope of European law for the first time. The EU has thus agreed to include Orthodoxy in its cultural and ideological paradigm. Yet Orthodoxy is coordinated by the Patriarchate of Constantinople, which is in a relationship of interdependence with other European religious centers of the Catholic and Anglican churches. This creates a unified religious space at the regional level, which is easier to monitor – an important argument in terms of administrative-bureaucratic logic. [3] Thus, all the transformations of the UOC as a result of state policy (loss of autonomy and a large chunk of property, a significant part of its members defecting to the OCU, to the Greek Catholic Church (GCC), or even to agnosticism) are seen by many human rights activists as a painful but inevitable reform necessary for European integration, in the same way as radical industrialization and other shock measures of modernity were once looked upon as inevitable.

3) The system for assessing the standards of religious freedom remains Western-centric. It seems to be less and less adequate for the nations representing distinct civilizations, whose historical experience is connected with the traditions of coexistence of different religions and denominations within one state. There is some strange irony in the fact that all of these countries – Russia, China, India, and the multi-confessional states of the Middle East – are on the list of “countries of concern” in American reports. These countries have the experience of different religious groups sharing the same national territory for many centuries, with deliberate efforts made by all their social institutions to prevent religious wars and subsequent splits along religious lines. Western nations have a different experience – having survived a period of religious wars, they are used to solving the problems of religious intolerance either by drawing new borders with population migrating, or by secularization, profanation (desacralization), and blotting the differences. The Western narrative (memory) does not only include episodes of religious tolerance in other parts of the world; events in Eastern Europe, on the borders of Poland, Russia, and Hungary have also been erased.

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4) Arising from Western-centrism is yet another problem that can be crucial, if we assume a lack of adequate expertise and overall incompetence. International organizations have inadequate insights into Orthodoxy. What’s more, they do not realize their incompetence because their documents include Orthodoxy in the larger category of “Christianity.” They do not presume to encounter in Orthodoxy a qualitative (rather than geographical or chronological) alternative to what they know about Western denominations. Hence the judgments by way of analogy: about the Patriarch of Constantinople as the “Head of the Orthodox Vatican” (which has become almost a part of the US foreign policy doctrine [4]), and about local Orthodox churches as similar to national Protestant churches whose territorial boundaries automatically change every time state borders change. And while non-Christian Eastern religions have long since become part of Western popular culture [5], albeit often in the form of a lightly-built new-age narrative, this is not the case with Orthodox Christianity, nor is it even possible. In the Ukrainian ecclesiastical matters, it is difficult to explain to non-Orthodox people (and sometimes even to Orthodox believers who do not know their heritage well enough) in legal terms why so much importance is attached, for example, to the value of “canonical Orthodoxy” as a right to the integrity of historical memory – not just as a chronicle, but as an ethical value, or solidarity between generations.

5) The method used by international institutions to communicate with religious organizations today can be described as multilateralism – creating a common “pool” for the largest number of religious organizations in a consultative status. In this connection, the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church is not represented at all in the UN system of international organizations is quite conspicuous. Thus, no Orthodox organization of the Moscow Patriarchate has consultative status in the ECOSOC (UN Economic and Social Council), while there are many organizations of other denominations on the list, including even some Orthodox organizations (for example, the Greek Archdiocese in America attached to the Patriarchate of Constantinople since 1985) The same applies to other departments, such as the Department of Public Information. In general, the UN lists of religious NGOs show that American organizations are more likely to receive permanent consultative status simply due to the location of their headquarters. [6] This discriminatory situation can be attributed to the religious policies of the USSR, when the Russian Orthodox Church could not develop normally and freely not only in the international environment but also domestically, thus missing out on the important era in the evolution of social practices between 1950 and 1980 (although mavericks admitted to church diplomacy tried to resist this state of affairs). Now as the UN system is in crisis, the gap between the ROC and other religious organizations in terms of influencing the international bureaucracy is probably no longer worth bridging. However, one should be cognizant of this problem, which is crucial in the Ukrainian crisis. It is particularly significant that during the period when the ROC was restricted in its involvement in international cooperation, the Patriarchate of Constantinople gained exaggerated importance by assuming the role of “representative of all Orthodoxy.” This was facilitated by the fact that its representatives had freedom of expression and academic mobility. Thus, a near monopoly of this church on Orthodox expertise was formed. The fact that the West today relies on the Phanar’s vision [7] of the situation in Ukrainian Orthodoxy has become particularly evident and is a serious challenge to and lesson for all those who indirectly or directly contributed to the process of international and legal elevation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.

Ways to overcome the problems of expertise and increase the effectiveness of protecting human rights pertaining to religious freedom

Ivan Timofeev:
A State as Civilisation and Political Theory

1. The politically biased criticism of religious freedom issues should inevitably be met with symmetrical responses, expression of concerns about the rights of believers in other countries outside Russia, following the example of the U.S. Commission Report. However, such mirror measures generally appear to be ineffective.

2. It is necessary to create multilateral religious expertise within the framework of regional fora in Eurasia and friendly countries. It would be useful to study the experience of China and India in defending their civilization from Western religious freedom experts. China upholds its right to religious freedom “with Chinese characteristics,” without engaging in ideological clashes and presenting its positions in small friendly venues, [8] whereas India openly criticizes the approaches of international organizations towards its religious specificity. [9]

3. To build healthy relations in protecting the rights related to international religious freedom, it is fundamentally important to ignore the assessments of organizations and fora created without Russian experts involved. Especially if these fora represent the “fragments of the Soros empire” in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. It is also important to overcome Western-centrism, which had demonstrated its bankruptcy after historic Christian churches were inflicted unprecedented damage – not only in Ukraine, but on a far more immense scale in Iraq and Syria.

4. At the current stage of socio-political development, it is obvious that the destruction of national theological education makes the country more vulnerable and creates problems for state sovereignty in the future. Therefore, it is necessary to increase domestic expertise by creating more jobs for the few theologians/religionists, supporting theological education and research initiatives aimed at critical examination of Western religious concepts in social sciences.

5. While recognizing that the military conflict leaves little room for improvement in the realm of Ukrainian Orthodox Church rights, it is nevertheless necessary to testify that a wait-and-see silence increases the risks. One might recall the international silence that accompanied the beginning of the Bolshevik religious persecution of Ukrainian Orthodox communities in the USSR in the early 1920s. Because the persecution focused on the Orthodox Church, it elicited little outcry from public and religious organizations abroad. [10] It was not until 1929, when the regime declared war on all religions and a large number of Protestant and Catholic leaders were arrested, that serious protests were voiced by Western organizations. [11]

Freedom of religion is a universal legal value, and so politicization and discrimination against this fundamental right does not contribute to stable development and peace.

1. Олбрайт М. Религия и мировая политика. М, 2007. Автор прямо говорит, что религия имеет ценность для дипломатии, поскольку во внешней политике западных стран она была одним из таранов разрушения социалистического блока. / Albright M. The Role of Religion in World Politics. M, 2007. The author says directly that religion has value for diplomacy, given that it was used as a battering ram by Western foreign

2. See Christian Reus-Smit. International Relations: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2020.

3. See Yermilov. Ukrainian Autocephaly as the Onset of Regional Reform of Church Structure // Causes and Challenges of the Current Crisis in Inter-Orthodox Relations: Proceedings of the Research to Practice Conference (PSTGU, February 25-26, 2019). М., 2020. p. 77-96.

4. Recounting her talks with Turkish diplomats, Madeleine Albright describes the status of the Patriarchate of Constantinople saying that even during the Ottoman Empire, having conquered Constantinople in 1453, the Ottoman rulers did not expel the patriarchy – the Orthodox equivalent of the Vatican – from its historic capital (Albright, M. The Role of Religion and World Politics. Moscow, 2007). The foundation for such a view in diplomatic circles was laid in the 1920s when the Lausanne Peace Treaty was being drafted. See Yermilov P.V., Chibisova A.A. All-Orthodox Leader: the Lausanne Conference and the Role of the Constantinople Patriarchate in the Orthodox World // Dialogue with Time. 2018. Issue. 63. p. 186-199

5. Meaning the popular image in the mass culture of Buddhist and Taoist monasteries and yogic schools

6. Berger, J. Religious Nongovernmental Organizations: An Exploratory Analysis // Voluntas: International Journal of Voluntary and Non-profit Organizations. 2003. 14(1). p. 15-40.

7. It is surprising that the 2022 International Religious Freedom Report refers to the Tomos of the Patriarchate of Constantinople as if it were a document incorporated into the legal system, which would make the use of the ecclesiastical term “schisma” in relation to the OCU by the UOC a sign of intolerance: “The ROC and the UOC continued to publicly describe the OCU as a ‘schismatic’ group, even though the OCU was granted a Tomos (decree) of Autocephaly by the Ecumenical Patriarch in 2019. The ROC continued to urge Orthodox churches around the world not to recognize the OCU.” Ukraine - United States Department of State

8. For example, see China’s Policies and Practices on Protecting Freedom of Religious Belief | US-China Institute (usc.edu)

9. In December 2020, India spoke up against the UNAOC (the UN Alliance of Civilizations) and the UN at large on account of its selective attitude towards world religions.

10. Today, the false narrative that the early 1920s was not a time of persecution is actively disseminated by Ukrainian religious scholars. Cf. “After the Ukrainian People’s Republic was defeated in 1920, comparative religious freedom endured in Soviet Ukraine through the end of the 1920s, after which Stalin’s anti-religious terror developed in full force.” (Druzenko G. Religion and the Secular State in Ukraine // J. Martinez-Torron and W. C. Durham, Jr. (eds). Religion and the Secular State: National Reports. Madrid, 2015. p. 711).

11. Moreover, these organizations were most often inspired not only by motives of religious solidarity, but also by political agendas. While criticizing Bolshevik policies, they did not mention similar measures taken by dictatorial governments in Europe. See Roulin S. A martyr factory? Roman Catholic crusade, Protestant missions and anti-communist propaganda against Soviet anti-religious policies, 1929-37 // Twentieth Century Communism. 2014 (7). p. 153-17