“Servants of the People” and OPZH want to block the adoption of a law banning the Moscow Patriarchate

Irina Gerashchenko reported that people's deputies from the Servant of the People faction, together with representatives elected from the OPZZH, found a mechanism for blocking the bill banning the Church of the Moscow Patriarchate.

They appealed to the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Stefanchuk with a demand to send this bill to the Venice Commission.

This was reported by the press center of European Solidarity.

“The church law will not be adopted until the end of 2023! And the question is not only the number of amendments; they could be considered in a few days. “Servants” and OPZZH found a more creative approach. They turned to Speaker Stefanchuk with a demand to send the bill to the Venice Commission for examination,” Gerashchenko writes on social networks.

SEDO (electronic document management system of parliament) shows that 50 deputies signed this appeal. The author of the initiative, Andrei Motovilovets, from the very beginning was not a supporter of putting the church bill on the agenda, citing freedom of conscience and non-interference of the state in church affairs. No arguments that in the case of the Russian Orthodox Church it is not about the church, but about national security, did not work for a long time,” the deputy notes.

“Among the signatories - and there are 50 of them - are the entire OPZZH (with a single exception), other interesting names, in particular Buzhansky, Dmitruk and co. Now the “servants” motivate their actions with international reaction, they say, among our partners, including in the United States, they criticize these bills, which lobbyists for Moscow priests present in the West as persecution of the church,” writes Irina Gerashchenko.

“Here is the full list of deputies who signed the letter to Stefanchuk. Well, the Russian Orthodox Church has a powerful lobby in the Ukrainian parliament,” Gerashchenko sums up.

Andrey Motovilovets, Artem Kultenko, Olga Savchenko, Victoria Grib, Artem Dmitruk, Evgeny Shevchenko, Sergey Litvinenko, Maxim Pavlyuk, Pavel Khalimon, Antonina Slavitskaya, Evgeny Bragar, Valery Gnatenko, Sergey Bunin, Stepan Chernyavsky, Georgy Mazurashu, Sergey Kuzminykh, Anna Skorokhod , Maxim Perebiynis, Anatoly Burmich, Daniil Getmantsev, Maxim Tkachenko, Sergei Magera, Nikolai Galushko, Valery Dubil, Alexander Fedienko, Margarita Shol, Pavel Frolov, Maxim Buzhansky, Alexander Feldman, Sergei Severin, Alexander Lukashev, Yuri Boyko, Alexander Kachny, Sergei Levochkin, Alexander Puzanov, Sergey Larin, Victor Cherny, Vasily Nimchenko, Vitaly Bort, Boris Prikhodko, Grigory Surkis, Mikhail Papiev, Yuliy Joffe, Nikolay Skori