Supreme Court upholds legality of the transition from the UOC MP to the OCU for the first time

This is reported by the OCU website.

Thus, for the first time, since the beginning of the active process of transitions of religious communities of Ukraine from the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the Supreme Court of Ukraine adopted a decision that confirmed the possibility and legality of such transitions and rejected the objections of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine against this.

On February 23 2019, the religious community of the village of Sutkivtsi, Khmelnytskyi region, in connection with the formation of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Ukraine, held a general meeting, at which it decided to move from the UOC-MP to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

Not wanting to join the Orthodox Church of Ukraine with the entire religious community and, in fact, acting against the will of the religious community itself, its rector appealed to the court with a claim in which he demanded to recognize this transition as illegal.

For quite a long time, this claim was considered in the Economic Court of Kyiv. In February 2020, a decision was made in favor of the rector of the religious community of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine. Later, this decision was left unchanged by the Court of Appeal.

However, on April 6, 2021, a court session of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court was held, which reviewed these court decisions under cassation procedure. Thus, as a result of this review, these court decisions were overturned, and the claim was rejected in full. That is, the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court confirmed the legality of the decision of the religious community of the village of Sutkivtsi, Khmelnytskyi region, on the transition from the Moscow Patriarchate to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

This decision of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court is of key importance, as it is the first among a number of legal disputes initiated by the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine since the beginning of the active process of transitions of religious communities of Ukraine to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, adopted by the highest court of Ukraine.

Thus, since the beginning of 2019, the UOC-MP has initiated more than 100 trials in disputes that are sufficiently new for Ukrainian legal proceedings regarding the legality of changing the subordination of orthodox religious communities in Ukraine. Due to this novelty, until April 6 of this year, there was no position of the Supreme Court of Ukraine on such issues, which resulted in the contradictory judicial practice of lower courts in resolving such disputes.

The decision of the Grand Chamber of the Supreme Court must necessarily be taken into account in disputes concerning the transition of orthodox religious communities of Ukraine from the Russian Orthodox Church to the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, and, thus, unify the approach of the courts of Ukraine in their resolution, protecting the legal right of religious communities to change jurisdiction.