Legal Department: SEFC experts should be held accountable for treason

Archpriest Oleksandr Bakhov, head of the Legal Department of the UOC. Photo: screenshot of the UOC YouTube channel

In an interview with the Information and Education Department, the head of the Legal Department of the UOC, Archpriest Oleksandr Bakhov said that the conclusions of the commission of the State Ethnic Policy on the relations of the UOC with Moscow cannot be called an expert examination at all.

“This is a certain interpretation of specialists in philosophy and history of their vision of the ecclesiastical-canonical relation in the Statute on the governance of the UOC. In general, reading these conclusions, I get the impression that they were given instructions from Russia, and the charter of the Russian Orthodox Church became the subject of the study,” the lawyer said.

He is sure that in war conditions, being guided by the documents of the aggressor country "is a crime, because the enemy can use it to mislead, to create certain public unrest, including on religious grounds."

The head of the Legal Department believes that “the examination is illegal, because as a result, the experts arbitrarily changed the subject and object of the study, referring to the Internet resources of the aggressor country, resorting to manipulation, created the prerequisites for the split of Ukrainian society along religious lines, which in turn creates the conditions for justifying military aggression against Ukraine.”

Summing up, Fr Oleksandr stated that the members of the commission "should be prosecuted for high treason."

Earlier, the UOJ wrote that the Legal Department of the UOC called the examination of the SEFC biased.

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