Abstract
After the collapse of Communism a good majority of post-Soviet societies perceived Churches as a ‘natural’ defender of human rights and human dignity. Opinion polls suggest that Ukrainians considered Churches as a bulwark of ‘poor and hapless’.
Gradually, in a complicated and nonlinear manner, the Churches and religious organizations of Ukraine succeeded in forming their own human rights agenda. They addressed the faithful and the whole society with issues on human dignity, rights and duties of citizens, civil society, and numerous urgent domestic, international, social and moral issues. Churches in Ukraine put forward valuable civil initiatives, stand for political freedom and justice for all, and loudly expressed their support for political prisoners.
Ukrainian Churches and religious organizations have played a significant role on the Ukrainian EuroMaidan during the winter 2013/2014. Prayer and worship on Maidan legitimized the protests.
Thus, despite Church hierarchies consider it not only possible but also necessary to restrict human rights when these rights transcend doctrinal dictation and devotional duty, Churches and religious organizations have been the efficient agents of democratic transformation and prominent actors of civil society, whose contribution to the process of promoting human rights and liberties is really hard to overestimate
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Notes
- 1.
It is not surprising that surveys about the political behavior of Ukrainian citizens reveal that adherents of the UOC MP and those who claim to be adherents of Russian Orthodox Church are more likely than others to vote for the Left, even when ethnicity is controlled for. By contrast, the faithful of the Ukrainian independent Orthodox Churches and UGCC are more likely to vote against the Left. Affiliation with one of the previously banned churches has a powerful deterrent effect for left−wing voting (See, among others, Birch 2000).
- 2.
The influx was especially dramatic in the late 1980s and early 1990s. An East-West Church and Ministry Survey carried out in 1996 showed that the number of foreign missionaries in the former Soviet Union alone had risen by 31 % in just 1 year. According to reports produced in the mid−1990s, there were over 1900 full-time missionaries from North America and South Korea in the country (Schindler et al. 1994)
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Yelensky, V. (2015). Religion and Human Rights: The Case of Ukraine. In: Ziebertz, HG., Črpić, G. (eds) Religion and Human Rights. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09731-2_16
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