Amsterdam: UCCRO has no right to endorse anti-UOC law without its presence

UCCRO meeting with Zelensky on August 16, 2024. Photo: screenshot of video t.me/dmytruk_info

Robert Amsterdam, head of the international human rights company Amsterdam & Partners LLP, stated that President Zelensky's claim of receiving "endorsement" from the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations for Draft Law No. 8371, which proposes an outright ban of the entire Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC), is false and intentionally misleading. This was reported in a press release published on the website savetheuoc.com, which was circulated to the media today.

"Although President Zelensky indeed held an online meeting with selected members of the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations, there was no representative of the UOC invited, and as such, the Council is unable to make any such statement endorsing the controversial law," Amsterdam stated.

He emphasized that the AUCCRO cannot issue any statement without the full consensus of all its members: "According to experts we have spoken with, it is not possible, according to the statutes, for the All-Ukrainian Council of Churches and Religious Organizations to issue any statement without full consensus of all members, whether they were present at a given meeting or not," Robert Amsterdam said. "The fact that the Ukrainian government has deployed some linguistic ambiguity to manufacture this disinformation in service of advancing its illegal religious cleansing law should be deeply worrying to everyone who cares about rule of law in Ukraine."

The human rights advocate also stated that there was significant political pressure during the meeting with the president, based on anonymous sources.

"A video released about the meeting with the president. It was a very strange setting that reminded me of the meeting of Putin with his security council before the full-scale invasion, and everybody recited their instructions: 'Yes, Mr. President, thank you, Mr. President, very good, Mr. President.','" the American lawyer wrote.

Amsterdam described Zelensky's meeting with the AUCCRO as a brazen attempt to outlaw an entire religion. He summarized that this decision would "shatter Ukraine's hopes of joining the EU and will place them in international law purgatory – all in the name of short-term nationalist political goals of one extremist faction. It’s a profound disgrace that does not serve the interests of Ukraine," he wrote.

As previously reported by the Union of Orthodox Journalists (UOJ), the UCCRO published a statement on its official website on August 17, 2024, regarding the meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky. The AUCCRO stated, though not explicitly naming it, that it supports Zelensky's legislative initiative to ban the UOC.

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