Lviv City Council loses case seeking demolition of OCU chapel

OCU chapel in Lviv. Photo: Leopolis.news

The Supreme Court has rejected the Lviv City Council’s bid to have an OCU chapel demolished and the land plot vacated. The court issued the relevant ruling, No. 139787248, on September 8, 2026.

The ruling dismissed the city authorities’ cassation appeal against lower court decisions that had barred the demolition of the religious community’s structure.

Earlier, representatives of the Lviv City Council filed a lawsuit with the Commercial Court of Lviv Region seeking to compel the OCU to vacate a municipally owned plot of 0.0043 hectares and remove the chapel. City officials argued that a trailer clad in wood had been placed on concrete blocks without authorization and that the land was located within a pipeline protection zone.

On February 12, the Commercial Court rejected the City Council’s lawsuit, and the Western Commercial Court of Appeal upheld that decision on May 6. The courts found that the parish did not own the structure but had merely received it for use on December 31, 2020, under a transfer and acceptance certificate from the Holy Spirit religious community in Ivano-Frankivsk.

The courts concluded that the parish’s use and maintenance of the chapel did not prove that the religious organization itself had unlawfully occupied the land. The Supreme Court agreed with the lower courts’ findings, leaving their decisions in force and ordering the Lviv City Council to pay the court fee.

As the UOJ previously reported, prosecutors in the Ternopil region are seeking the return of an OCU monastery to the state.

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