This is stated in the court's decision published on the website of the ECHR on September 1.
The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) decided not to take urgent steps to protect the churches of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine in the occupied Crimea.
This is stated in the court's decision, published on the website of the ECHR on September 1, LB.ua reports.
"The court decided to reject the requests as the ones that fall outside the scope of rule 39 (provisional measures) of the rules of court since they do not entail the risk of serious and irreparable harm. The court upholds such requests only in exceptional cases when the applicants would face a real risk of irreparable harm," the report says.
The occupation authorities of Crimea demand that the OCU (former UOC-KP) vacate the Cathedral of the Holy and Equal-to-the-Apostles Volodymyr and Olga in occupied Simferopol. The occupation courts decided on eviction from the temple in the summer of 2019. Real attempts at removal began at the end of August of that year. On August 4, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation refused a cassation review of court decisions on the eviction of the Crimean Diocese of the OCU from the Cathedral.
One of the first demands of the Russian authorities after the occupation of Crimea was the re-registration of all religious organizations on the peninsula. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Kyiv Patriarchate (which later became part of the Orthodox Church of Ukraine) did not surrender to the demands of the occupation authorities. The Crimean diocese of the UOC of the Moscow Patriarchate, unlike the diocese of the Kyivan Church, was re-registered in December 2014.
Since the beginning of the occupation, a general policy of intolerance towards other Christian denominations, except for the Moscow Patriarchate, also spread to the territory of Crimea along with Russian legislation. This led to the fact that during the occupation, the situation of the UOC (OCU) on the peninsula deteriorated significantly.