Constitution Protection Committee holds a rally in defence of UOC rights

Участник акции Леонид Афанасьевич. Фото: Перший Козацький

On July 22, 2019, the Constitution Protection Committee held a rally in front of the building of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine in defence of the constitutional rights of believers of the UOC, reports the “1Kozak” TV channel.

“We handed in a petition so that religion is respected, and people should be treated in a human way. And not the way they were treated under Poroshenko,” a rally participant, pensioner Leonid Afanasyevich, told reporters.

He noted that those in power have not solved the economic problems in the country, and now they have also made a discord in the Church.

“We have a single Ukrainian Church. They shouldn’t have intervened there. Church affairs are church affairs. And the state has no relation to it. And we had a discord. The Government, the President (former President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko – Ed.) intervened, and now we’ll settle it for years,” the participant in the rally told the reporters.

According to him, the protesters insist on creating a committee that would ensure compliance with the constitutional rights of the citizens of Ukraine.

On July 9, 2019, the Committee for the Protection of the Constitution of Ukraine and the Rights of Citizens held the similar action in front of the building of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky in defence of the rights of Ukrainians to freedom of religion. “The trigger was the creation by the Cabinet of Ministers of the State Service for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience. We believe that its functioning is unconstitutional,” the organizer of the event and human rights defender of the Committee Milana Melnichuk told the UOJ at that time. “A team of experts conducted a study – the safety data sheet of Ukraine for the EU. They recorded the growth of tension, seizures of temples, destabilization, made an analysis of religious laws and realized that we need to urgently change them in order to defuse a potential conflict.”

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