Metropolitan Volodymyr Addresses Ukraine’s Leadership on Question of Identification Numbers

KYIV – In view of the discussion of the Taxation Code Bill by the Ukrainian Parliament the head of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church-Moscow Patriarchate (UOC-MP), Metropolitan Volodymyr addressed the government with the stance of the UOC-MP on the section of the bill concerning identification numbers. The web site of UOC-MP posted the hierarch’s address on March 19, 2010.

Introducing human codification from the moment of birth and a single unified personal document - the electronic card, the state in fact sanctions electronic monitoring and the total control over all spheres of human life.   No one can guarantee that the electronic system of control over a person and the person’s full dependence on it will not be used for economical, ideological, political, or economical manipulation,” reads the document 

Metropolitan Volodymyr stresses that on the one hand he supports the efforts of the legislative bodies to make the laws of Ukraine correspond to international standards as well as the reasonable measures of the world community meant to cope with terrorism, which at the beginning of the third millennia has turned from the local phenomenon into the all-human threat. At the same time he expressed his disquietude about such a bill: “At such circumstances a person loses God-granted freedom…it may happen that not only every person will lose his or her personal freedom, but our state will lose its independence.”

As a response to this, Metropolitan Volodymyr shared the following propositions with the state authorities:

1) To take into account the expression of will of the believers, expounded in the decisions of the Holy Synod of the UOC of  19.05.1998 and of 29.12.2003 and to provide on these grounds the actualization of the constitution rights and freedoms of the citizens who refused to accept the identification number by means of introducing to the draft Taxation Code legislative provisions stipulating for an alternative from of accounting of the taxpayers (e.g. by passport data), and providing for the possibility for the citizens to conduct payments without identification numbers;

2) To commit the State Tax Administration of Ukraine through its local tax inspections to make notes in the passports about the possibility to make payments without identification numbers on the grounds of the citizens' statements, and to annul the identification numbers of the citizens who refused them.