The law on banning the UOC will work in 9 months, - Verkhovna Rada speaker Stefanchuk

The speaker of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine, Ruslan Stefanchuk, has said that the law on banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, if adopted, will be finally implemented in 9 months. Stefanchuk believes that during this period of time the entire regulatory framework will be finalized so that the law would work without failures. He stated this on the air of the telethon “United News”.

“Consideration of the bill (on the activities in Ukraine of religious organizations — ed.) will be held at the next meeting of the Verkhovna Rada. The Russian Church in Ukraine will be banned, and this is a clear provision that is provided for in Article 3 of this bill. It is good that there was time to bring it to a certain level of perfection, because there are a lot of amendments, first of all, of a legal nature, which we managed to implement in order to make this bill work, because the worst thing in an issue about which there is a great expectation of the society is to hastily adopt an imperfect law that will not work. What we have managed to work on, for me, is a reason for certain optimism — the bill will be of better quality than it was before,” — the Speaker noted.

The Speaker of the Parliament added that according to the calculations of the relevant committee, it will take about 9 months for the law to work in full force. During this time the regulatory framework and other mechanisms for its implementation will be developed.

“We calculated in such a way that somewhere a month for entry into force, three months for the Cabinet to work out the regulatory framework, after that a whole series of implementation. That is, after nine months, the organizations, which will be covered by the law, can be recognized in court as having ceased their activities”, — explained Stefanchuk.

We will remind, earlier religious scholar and lobbyist of the OCU in the media Tetyana Derkach criticized the people’s deputies of Ukraine for lying about the bill № 8371, aimed at banning the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. Derkach believes that the MPs are deliberately lying when they claim that no religious organization in Ukraine will be banned by this law.