ORTHODOX CHURCH BODY SEEKS TIGHTER RESTRICTIONS ON RELIGIOUS
FREEDOM
by Lawrence A. Uzzell
By pushing for a tougher crack-down on religious minorities than
several key secular officials are willing to accept, the Moscow
Patriarchate's Department of External Church Relations may end up
ensuring that Russia's 1990 law protecting freedom of conscience
remains unchanged. Rumoured disagreements between the department's
head, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk, and Patriarch Aleksei II
came into the open at a September 27 hearing on a bill narrowing
religious freedom which had received preliminary approval from the
Duma in July.
In a striking series of omissions, Patriarch Aleksei's key
representative at the hearing failed to endorse or even to discuss
the most radical of the amendments proposed by Kirill's department
and endorsed by the 'Our Home is Russia' parliamentary faction of
Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin, but to date not embraced by
the Duma as a whole. He thus indirectly confirmed what a member of
Chernomyrdin's staff told Keston News Service on September 25:
"Kirill's position is clearly different from Aleksei's." The prime
minister's aide predicted that if the amendments proposed by the
Department of External Church Relations are added to the July
bill, "it will not become law."
Another highlight of the September 27 hearing was chairman Valeri
Borshchov's maneuvering to place himself and the Duma's religion
committee as 'moderates', supporting a position somewhere between
Metropolitan Kirill's and that of the most militant defenders of
religious freedom such as Moscow journalist Yakov Krotov. By
giving Krotov the lead-off position among the hearing's outside
witnesses, even ahead of those representing the Patriarchate and
the Roman Catholic Church, Borshchov made his own proposed
amendments to the Duma's July bill look like the ideally balanced
compromise.
Formally the September 27 hearing took place under the auspices of
the executive branch. It was conducted in one of the presidential
staff's plush, tightly guarded buildings on Moscow's Old Square
(formerly the home of the Soviet Communist Party's Central
Committee) in the form of a session of a human-rights panel which
gives advice to President Yeltsin. But in substance the panel's
meeting was really a legislative hearing, led by Duma deputy
Borshchov and Duma religion committee aide Vyacheslav Polosin. Not
one official from the executive branch even spoke, though
Borshchov's aides distributed copies of a statement from Ruslan
Orekhov of Yeltsin's legal staff, which dismissed every one of
Metropolitan Kirill's nine proposed amendments as unwise or
unconstitutional.
At this hearing, as in earlier debates on new religious
legislation, the most controversial issue continued to be the
rights of foreign religious organizations. Responding to minority
religious leaders such as Archbishop Kondrusiewicz, the Apostolic
Administrator for Roman Catholics in European Russia, Borshchov
unveiled a new amendment to the July bill which would give the
term "foreign religious organization" a specific legal definition:
an organization "formed by foreign citizens and operating outside
the borders of the Russian Federation." Borshchov's aide Polosin
told the hearing that without this definition, a group of, say,
Roman Catholics all of whom are Russian citizens could be
considered "foreign."
About 20 of Russia's provincial governments, said Polosin, have
already enacted what he called "unconstitutional" laws or
executive decrees against foreign missionaries; Kaliningrad's, for
example, states that any religious group with a center located
outside Russia is a "foreign" organization. Udmurtia's, he said,
is even harsher: it would allow local authorities to classify a
visiting preacher from any other Russian province as a
"foreigner."
"This is of course nonsense," said Polosin. "If Russian citizens
join with each other within Russia, of course their organization
is Russian."
But Polosin also stressed that his and Borshchov's new amendment
would not require the state to grant registration to foreign
religious groups. "It's an optional process; if there's something
doubtful the state can refuse," he said.
In sharp contrast to Borshchov's position, Metropolitan Kirill's
department has continued to push for its amendment which would
permit foreign religious groups to operate within Russia only as
guests of Russian churches. The amendment, which states that
"independent religious activity by foreign religious organizations
is forbidden" was part of a package of nine distributed in the
name of Metropolitan Kirill's department at the September hearing.
But Viktor Kalinin, legal advisor to Patriarch Aleksei and a
former official of the defunct USSR's Council for Religious
Affairs, said nothing about this amendment-- or even about the
general question of foreign religious organizations-- in his
statement at the hearing. Instead he stressed a proposed
amendment which would allow the state to subsidise the church's
charitable activities.
Asked afterward by Keston News Service if his statement to the
hearing reflected the position of Metropolitan Kirill's
department, Kalinin emphasized that he is not subordinate to that
department. He said that he had agreed to address the hearing at
the direct personal request of Patriarch Aleksei.
Only toward the hearing's end did a representative of Metropolitan
Kirill's department get the floor for a short statement. Father
Vsevolod Chaplin said that Russia's current laws improperly allow
foreign religious organizations "to create artificial structures
here" even if they do not have any believers in Russia. He
conceded that the amendments proposed by his colleagues may be
"imperfect" and "may even partly contradict the Constitution"--
but he insisted that "the law now in force does not anticipate a
whole range of conflicts; these amendments are definitely a step
forward."
Borshchov asked Father Chaplin how Metropolitan Kirill's proposed
ban on independent foreign religious organizations would apply to
the Anglican parish in Moscow. (St Andrew's Church, built in the
19th century by and for the British community in Moscow and
forcibly closed under Stalin, is now functioning again with a
mostly expatriate congregation under a priest of the Church of
England.) Father Chaplin replied that "any ten foreign
residents," just like any ten Russians, would still have the right
to create a congregation in Russia. He said that such a
congregation should not automatically be considered a
"representative body" of a foreign religious organization.
After the hearing Keston News Service asked Father Chaplin whether
his statement reflected the Patriarch's views as well as
Metropolitan Kirill's. He replied that he had expressed only his
own personal views-- but added that all nine of his department's
proposed amendments were endorsed by the Russian Orthodox Church
as a whole.
At the opposite pole from Father Chaplin, the September session
heard from two journalists widely known as human-rights advocates,
Yakov Krotov and Vladimi Oiven. Krotov was even more forceful
than Father Chaplin in criticiszing the Duma's July bill as
unacceptable-- in his view not because it would give the state
too little power over religion, but too much. He said that the
proposed system of registering foreign religious groups would
require Russian state officials to ask the foreign ministries of
other countries various questions about those countries' religious
organizations, and predicted that governments like that of the
United States would simply refuse to answer such questions.
Krotov said that July bill includes so many changes to the 1990
law which is now in force that it would in effect replace that law
with a qualitatively different system. Among its most dangerous
provisions, he said, are those allowing the state to ban religious
activities which allegedly threaten state security or to enforce a
church's internal canon laws against the church itself. He also
charged that the bill's Article 12 would allow the state not only
to cancel a religious group's registration but to forbid its
activities altogether.
Krotov identified three basic ideological models for church-state
relations. First, he said, is the American model, which is the
most democratic-- the one he prefers and the one embodied in
Russia's 1990 law. Second is the Greek model of a state church,
which he said was the inspiration for the proposals from the
Moscow Patriarchate. He said that the Duma's July bill follows a
middling option, somewhat like that of France-- not totalitarian
in itself "but a step toward totalitarianism."
Borshchov challenged Krotov's interpretation of Article 12 but
agreed that "your observations are in many ways just."
Nevertheless, he said, the Duma has to respond to the existing
concrete political situation, in which Russia's provincial
governments are enacting even more restrictive local measures.
Commenting on Krotov's ideological categories, Father Chaplin
criticized what he called "attempts to impose on Russia models
which are not compatible with European experience." Such models,
he said, include both the Soviet and the American schemes of
church-state relations; as the only country in the world created
by immigrants, the U.S. has a system which would not work in any
European country.
Fr Chaplin said that recent experience in Russia has shown that
"religion can have a negative influence, both on the state and on
the individual." Russia should therefore protect not only a
person's right to speak about his religion, he said, but also his
right not to listen to a preacher of another faith.
Also responding to Krotov, Kalinin said that the existing 1990 law
clearly needs to be changed because, among other things, it
recognizes the state teaching of atheism. (Krotov countered that
the law does not use the term "state atheism.") The Patriarch's
representative said that international agreements permit the
banning of religious activities which threaten state security, and
that the current law's provision allowing state subsidies for the
restoration of church buildings could be a precedent for subsidies
to church charities. He added that even though the July bill is
insufficient, he hoped that some form of legislation would be
enacted this year.
In addition to the issues discussed by Kalinin and Father Chaplin,
one of the new amendments proposed by Metropolitan Kirill's
department would ban activities "insulting the religious feelings
of citizens." Another would strike from the July bill a provision
which bars "the establishment of any advantages or limitations"
for one religious group against others.
Borshchov called on participants in the hearing to submit by ene
end of September any further amendments which they would like the
Duma to consider. His aide Lev Levinson told Keston News Service
afterward that the Duma's religion committee will then submit a
revised bill to the Duma, which will probably take it up for a
"second reading" in November.
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