According to the information of the Crimean Field Mission on Human Rights (CFMHR), only 11 religions communities have been reregistered by the Russian legislation. The information is presented on the CFMHR official website.
“Prior to establishment of jurisdiction of Russia, there were over 2000 church communities on the peninsula. More than 1400 of them were officially registered. As the monitoring document of the Mission reports, according to the data of the CFMHR, by February 12, 2015 only about 100 parishes applied for re-registration and only 11 of them had actually reregistered.
According to the decree of the Russian authorities, religious organizations should reregister until January 1, 2015. Then the term was extended to March 1. However, until now only a few ones were able to pass the process of re-registration.
In the CFMHR experts’ opinion, there are a couple reasons of the current situation – the complicated bureaucratic procedure, poor knowledge of the juridical base of both the clerks and the applicants, the “chicanery of the registry authority”.
As the document of the CFMHR stated, there are two ways of registration in the Russian legislation: infusion into an already existing Russian organization and registration of a separate parish or a whole confession. The first option is the easiest one while the second one requires a lot of arrangements.
“For example it is needed to describe the essence of a religious denomination. It is required to explain the attitude of the religious denomination to the institution of the family, the attitude to the homosexual marriages, divorces,” the experts of the CFMHR inform, noting that the registry authorities ask questions regarding the attitude to the state, which don’t have any direct connection to the religion.”
The Mission employees note that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Kiev Patriarchate is under threat of suppression and its buildings for public worship could be given to the Moscow Patriarchate.
“If churches that belong to it do not re-register, then their activity in Crimea will be considered as illegal, and the temples can be given to the Moscow Patriarchate. Churches in the villages Osovunu, Perevalnoye, in Kransnoperekopsk and a temple in Nakhimov Naval School have been already taken away. The rental cost of the Cathedral of St. Vladimir and Princess Olga was raised from 1 000 to 6000 UAH a year for the UOC-KP in Simferopol.
The main problem for the Catholic Churches is the citizenship of priests, who are citizens of Ukraine and Poland and according to the Russian legislation, can’t stay on the territory of the peninsula more than 3 months.
In opinion of the CFMHR experts, in addition to the problems with re-registration, a lot of other problems appeared for the Crimean religions communities: problems with financing, distribution of their materials, communication with representatives from outside of the territory of Crimea, rental and utilities payments. For example, unregistered communities can not pay the utilities, “because private persons can not pay bills invoiced for organizations. Because of this, buildings that belong to them can be taken away.”
According to the experts, such situation complicates activities of the parishes, and the decrease of the officially registered communities in the peninsula already “has the extremely negative effect on the religious freedom in the region.”
