Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
The name of a religious group is usually considered an aspect of its autonomy. The name can be based on religious history and theology and serve as the group’s self-representation to its members, the public, and the state. Other posts in this blog series discuss how, from the perspective of freedom of religion or belief (FoRB), a religiously neutral state can interfere in naming for non-religious reasons, such as protection of intellectual rights, prohibition of morally inappropriate or pejorative names, or prior use of the names by other religious organizations. These restrictions apply similarly to religious organizations and to NGOs, political parties, and even business corporations alike.
However, state practices in this field are more complicated. The state can restrict the naming of religious entities to favor religions historically important to national identity, over their competitors in the religious market. The state can also impose limitations on the naming of religious groups that the state suspects, for a variety of reasons, are disloyal. In this post, I discuss three recent cases from Bulgaria, Estonia, and Ukraine where the naming of religious groups has been restricted for these reasons.
Bulgaria: Protection of the Local Orthodox Church
In December 2024, the Bulgarian Supreme Court decided to register the Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church—a small Orthodox church alternative to the country’s majority religion, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church–Bulgarian Patriarchate (BOC–BP). This decision was made in execution of the European Court of Human Right’s judgment in Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church and Others v. Bulgaria (2021), where the Strasbourg Court held that the government’s refusal to recognize the church violated religious rights of the church and its members.
In January 2025, in response to the Supreme Court’s decision, the Bulgarian Parliament amended, by an overwhelming majority, the 2002 Religious Denomination Act to limit the use of the adjective Orthodox by local religions. According to the 2025 amendments, the BOC–BP is considered the only and sole representative of Eastern Orthodoxy in Bulgaria, and other religious groups are prohibited from using Orthodox or similar words so as not to mislead the public. The amendments were enthusiastically promoted and supported by the BOC–BP, which claimed that the Supreme Court’s decision and the recognition of the alternative Orthodox church would result in the blending of religious institutionswithin Bulgarian society.
The law also prescribes that new religious organizations with the word Orthodox or similar words in their names shall not be registered and that already-registered organizations shall change their names or otherwise be dissolved. The 2025 amendments are at obvious odds with the Strasbourg Court’s judgment and, if enforced, will effectively nullify it by either deregistering the Bulgarian Orthodox Old Calendar Church or forcing it to carve out the word Orthodox from its name and, thereby, stop representing itself as an Christian Orthdoox church, which constitutes an important part of its religious identity.
Estonia: Security Concerns over the Russia-Linked Church
The Russia-Ukraine war has raised security concerns over the activities of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) of the Moscow Patriarchate as the church has endorsed, justified, and even advanced Putin’s attack of Ukraine. In Estonia, these concerns have prompted the government to demand that the local Estonian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate (EOC–MP) sever all ties with their mother church, the ROC.
While the EOC–MP has not supported either the Russian aggression or ROC Patriarch Kirill’s involvement in it, the EOC–MP refused to cut its ties with Moscow. The church argues it is not involved in any illegal behavior and its connection to the ROC is merely ecclesiastical and is a protected aspect of its religious freedom. As a response, the Estonian government proposed a law banning religious organizations affiliated with Russia for national security reasons. The law was passed by the Estonian parliament but vetoed by the Estonian president for FoRB–related reasons and returned to the parliament for the reconsideration.
Amidst the conflict with the government, the EOC–MP decided to change its name first to the “Estonian Orthodox Church” (without reference to the Moscow Patriarchate) and then to the “Estonian Orthodox Christian Church.” The name change was motivated by the EOC–MP’s wish to emphasize its administrative independence from Moscow and avoid public association with the ROC. Initially, both requests for a name change were denied because the government considered the new names to be misleading, as the EOC–MP did not unite all Orthodox Christians in Estonia. The church filed a legal appeal, and in March 2025 the Tartu district court confirmed the church’s right to change the name to the “Estonian Orthodox Christian Church” (EOCC).
The argument that the name is misleading is weakened by the fact that the Estonian government is significantly more relaxed regarding the names of religious groups not connected to Russia. For example, the Estonian Christian Pentecostal Church, which does not unite all Estonian Pentecostals, freely operates in the country. Thus, one may suppose, the government is less concerned about confusion among believers and more concerned with the EOC–MP/EOCC’s potential political disloyalty in the context of a growing Russian threat. While this threat is real, the regulation of religious entities’ naming practices seems to be neither an effective nor a FoRB–compliant response to this threat.
Ukraine: Security Concerns and Spiritual Liberation
The Ukrainian case involves the same concerns over the Russian Orthodox Church, heightened by the actual aggressive war that the Russian Federation has been waging against the country since 2014, and even more intensely since February 2022.
One religious result of this war already has been the ecclesiastical recognition (Tomos) of the independent Orthodox Church of Ukraine, facilitated by the Ukrainian government and granted by Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew in 2019. This recognition was meant to support the independent Orthodox Church against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) of the Moscow Patriarchate and was supplemented with several laws targeting the UOC for its links with Russia.
One of these laws required the UOC to change its name to something akin to the “Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine,” to explicitly identify its connection to Russia. The drafters and supporters of the law relied on an argument similar to that used in Estonia—that the name was misleading. They claimed that the UOC’s usage of the adjective Ukrainian, often without any reference to the Moscow Patriarchate, deliberately misleads people to believe the church is Ukrainian when, in reality, it is a Russian church. The law stipulates that if UOC communities do not change their names accordingly, their charters will lose their legal force with regard to the communities’ names. This effectively restricts the operation of affected communities in amending their charters, selling real property, and acting in other ways.
The law has never been enforced, largely because Volodymyr Zelenskyi, who was elected soon after the law’s adoption, initially neutralized Ukraine’s religious policies and, during the first years of his presidency, did not embroil himself in religion and, more specifically, inter-Orthodox relations.
Zelenskyi’s approach changed a few months after the February 2022 invasion. Even though the UOC declared its “full independence” from the Moscow Patriarchate in May 2022, the Ukrainian president proposed a law to ban the UOC if the latter did not sever all ties with its mother church. When the law was adopted in August 2024, Zelenskyi claimed it would finally liberate Ukrainians spiritually from Russia. (I have addressed FoRB and security aspects of this law in a different post, and they are beyond my focus here.) What is interesting, however, is that, while the government has been preparing to implement the 2024 law, the name-related limitations imposed by the Ukrainian state in 2019 returned to play.
In December 2024, the government announced it would exempt up to 50 percent of the clergy from military mobilization. (General mobilization of military conscripts has been implemented in Ukraine since February 2022 with no religious exemptions). This benefit, which Ukrainian religions had lobbied for since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale aggression, has put the government in an awkward position. On the one hand, the government cannot explicitly exclude UOC priests from this regulation without being accused of discrimination. On the other hand, providing this exemption to the religion that the government intends to ban seems illogical and, more importantly, very unpopular in Ukrainian society.
The 2019 naming law has provided the Ukrainian government with a solution to this problem. The Ukrainian Service for Ethnic Affairs announced that UOC priest would not be exempted from mobilization because the government was not able to identify the names of their communities, as these names have lost their legal force in accordance with the 2019 naming law. (There is a debate whether the 2019 naming law is still in force due to further legislative amendments, but this question is beyond my focus. For the purposes of this text, I presume that the law is in force.) In June 2025, the government published the list of religious organizations whose clerics can be exempted from mobilization, with no UOC organizations on the list. Thus, the 2019 naming law has been utilized to discriminate against the religion that the Ukrainian government considers disloyal and unworthy to operate in Ukraine’s religious market.
Conclusion
Remarkably enough, all three above-mentioned cases are grounded in a communitarian understanding of religion-state relations. They rest on the premise that religion in general (or the religion of majority) is a public good and a point of security concern for the state that the latter should address by restricting the activity of religions that either compete with the religion of majority (Bulgaria) or are perceived as a threat to the state.
However, all the above-mentioned limitations on the naming of religious organizations are argued and justified as a protection of individual religious freedom—as a way to prevent believers from mistakenly perceiving a certain religion as something it is not: a truly Bulgarian Orthodox church, a church uniting Orthodox believers in Estonia, or a church not affiliated with Russia in Ukraine. Still, while imposing these restrictions, the state goes far beyond the triad of respecting, protecting, and fulfilling human rights and enters the domain of so-called “spiritual security,” where not only spiritual needs but also certain societal spiritual goals (such as a truly national religious landscape liberated from foreign influence) become a matter for the state’s attention and protection.
International human rights law does not prevent the state from regulating religious names. Nor does it even prohibit the state from supporting certain historically important religions. However, as shown by the examples above, if the regulation of religious names is implemented for religious purposes, rather than non-religious purposes such as copyright protection, it may be much more difficult to reconcile the regulation with FoRB standards.