UOC priest from Ugrinov – facing threats?

Opponents of the UOC community in Ugrinov village of Volyn region imply to the orthodox priest’s family he may be deprived of his parental rights. According to the reporter of the Union of Orthodox Journalists, such information has been communicated for the last 6 months by the villagers to protopriest Rostislav Sapozhnik, senior priest of the church having been earlier seized by the Kiev Patriarchate.

It will be reminded that in April 2016, by the decision of Lokachino district court, the UOC community’s priest and his wife are evicted of his house in Ugrinov. Herewith this decision does not relate to their two sons. Despite the long-time dwelling and registration permit for the whole family, the Kiev Patriarchate documented this real estate as its own. The court of appeal in Volyn region left the decision unchanged, whereupon a cassation appeal has been registered for consideration.

The couple has already received a letter from the district justice executive service, according to which they are to leave their place of living before 5 October 2016. There are no explanations so far how the executors will act, since even if parents are hypothetically evicted, the status of their children, one of whom is under age, remains vague. Yet, soon after the decision in the primary court, fellow citizens persistently implied to the parents they would be allegedly deprived of their parental rights with regard to their younger son, while the other child would be dispatched to the appropriate institution.

Perhaps, it is done in order to intimidate the family and make it leave Ugrinov without waiting for the arrival of court officers, for the UOC KP needs to somehow get rid of the family with children to finally take hold of the house property.

Back in April the UOJ correspondents turned for comments to specialists from the service on children. The latter made it clear they track down right protection in similar juridical cases when it comes to expropriation of lodgings from mortgage debtors. In such cases courts really allow minors to live in such apartments till they come of age, and their parents, respectively, live together with them, enjoying their parental rights, despite the court decision on eviction. As for the threats “to dispatch children to the boarding school”, parents’ having no accommodation does not serve as a ground to take children away from the family. At least the procedure of parental rights deprivation is, first of all, public, and fairly complicated. Furthermore, only parents and representatives of social services have a right to enter the lodging occupied by minor children.

The priest’s family has no other accommodation. Lodging a complaint on eviction from the taken-over house, representatives of the Kyiv Patriarchate added thereto an abstract from the real estate registry, according to which Rostislav and Nataliya Sapozhnik possessed allegedly several real estate assets in three regions of Ukraine.

The court received a disclaimer of this falsified technical information on the assets that belong to the people having the same family names and standing in absolutely no relation to the spouses. Despite all this, the judges satisfied the lawsuit with a demand to evict the people from the house, privatized by the different party, without granting an alternative accommodation.

Where the Kiev Patriarchate representatives took the passport details of the priest’s wife to enter them into the search real estate registry database, the Court of Appeal did not bother to find out. The claimant’s defense counsel – the UOC-KP community in Ugrinov village – lawyer Yulia Spirina did not give a clear-cut answer to this question, though she tried to explain this strange fact the passport details were obtained in the address bureau when another lawsuit was being prepared. Herewith it’s noteworthy the certificate she named does not have even a single reference to the series and number of the defendant’s passport. The author of the inquiry to the registry used by the Kiev Patriarchate, Mr. Oleg Pasechnik, did not even turn up at the final court session on 30 August 2016.

The Union of Orthodox Journalists will follow the developments.