Ukraine Archives - Page 6 of 10 - Talk About: Law and Religion

Not My Church: Ukraine’s New Draft Law Dealing with the Ukraine Orthodox Church of (not) the Moscow Patriarchate

Post published:February 24, 2023

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and Director of the Centre for the Rule of Law and Religion Studies, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Ukraine). An earlier version of this piece was posted on Forum18.

The Russia-Ukraine war, starting with the annexation of Crimea and the military conflict in eastern Ukraine and continuing with Russia’s full-scale invasion, has had a tremendous effect on freedom of religion or belief (FoRB) and other related human rights in the region. Murders, tortures, forced detention, and FoRB violations—including forced displacement of priests and believers, acts of religious discrimination and social hatred to religious minorities inspired and directed by Russian proxies, as well as expropriations of religious properties—have become the reality of the territories occupied by Russia in 2014 and 2022.

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The War and Religion in Ukraine: The Role of NGOs in Evidence Collection for Future International Trials

Post published:February 3, 2023

Michelle Coleman is a lecturer in law at Swansea University.

The war in Ukraine is possibly the most documented war in history. Governments, news organizations, the International Criminal Court, NGOs, and individuals are continually monitoring and documenting events as they take place in real time. Some of this collection and preservation of information is with an eye toward determining whether war crimes and crimes against humanity have been committed.

In March 2022 I wrote for this blog about the importance of information collection before deciding whether international criminal law would be pertinent to the war in Ukraine. I argued that the need for prosecutions and trials can only be determined following a thorough investigation. Some time must pass while a conflict is ongoing in order to gain perspective, gather evidence, and sort through what might be a war crime or crime against humanity and what might just be an unfortunate, but legal, consequence of war. Now, nearly a year later, we can consider the importance of this information gathering and how it may be used within the context of international criminal law.

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Ukrainian Churches and the Implementation of the Istanbul Convention in Ukraine: Being European Without Accepting “Gender”

Post published:November 27, 2022

Regina Elsner is a researcher at the Centre for East European and International Studies (ZOiS) in Berlin.

The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, known as the Istanbul Convention, appeared not only to be an instrument of preventing domestic and gender-based violence but also to symbolize a civilizational choice in times of culture wars. On 1 November 2022, the Istanbul Convention entered into law in Ukraine. After years of controversial public debates and two unsuccessful attempts, the Ukrainian Parliament finally ratified the Convention amidst Russia’s aggressive war.

Ukraine participated in drafting the Istanbul Convention and signed it in 2011. Since that time, the country struggled over the ratification of the Convention and its implementation into Ukrainian law and society. One of the main obstacles has been religious communities and conservative groups, which strongly oppose the use of the term gender as well as references to gender identity and sexual orientation in the text of the Convention. At the same time, most religious actors in Ukraine are supportive of the “European” choice of Ukraine and the more general concept of “European values.” Thus, in Ukraine we have witnessed a more complex religious attitude to gender discourse than mere endorsement of illiberalism or “right-wing defiance to West-Eurocentrism.”[1]

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