Ten months after the highly restrictive religion law came into force and the compulsory re-registration process began, Forum 18 News Service has learnt that only a small proportion of religious organisations have re-registered. Only 27 of 140 have re-registered at national level, while progress is especially slow for those that must re-register with the local authorities. "Things aren't moving at the local level," Bishop Sergei Khomich, head of the Pentecostal Union, complained to Forum 18. As the new law criminalises unregistered religious activity, re-registration is essential to the continuing legal operation of individual religious organizations.
Almost halfway through the compulsory re-registration period
allotted to religious organisations by the highly
restrictive new religion law adopted last October, only a small proportion have
re-registered, with progress especially slow at the local level.
Representatives of two major denominations - the Baptist and Full Gospel
Churches – told Forum 18 News Service that they are currently declining to
submit re-registration applications at the republican level. As the new law
criminalises unregistered religious activity,
re-registration is essential to the continuing legal operation of individual
religious organisations.
The religion law envisages two levels of re-registration prior to its 16
November 2004 deadline. Organisations containing ten
or more affiliate local communities in at least four of the country's six
regions (one of which must have functioned in Belarus for at least 20 years)
must re-register with the main government body dealing with religious
organisations, the State Committee for Religious and Ethnic
Affairs. The same applies to monasteries and monastic communities, brotherhoods
and sisterhoods, missions and religious educational institutions. Local
religious communities, however, must re-register with regional executive
committees or, if they are located in the capital, with Minsk City Council.
Russia's 1997 law on religion contained a broadly similar arrangement.
Formally, it did not make re-registration at the local level any easier for
communities affiliated to religious organisations
that had already re-registered at the federal level. In practice, however,
affiliation to a centralised religious
organisation almost always acted as a rubber stamp for
successful re-registration at the local level. This appeared to be the indirect
consequence of a November 1999 decision by Russia's Constitutional Court, which
ruled that local religious organisations less than 15
years old should nevertheless retain full legal rights following
re-registration if they were affiliated to a centralised
religious organisation.
No such ruling exists in Belarus, however. Minsk-based lawyer Dina
Shavtsova confirmed to Forum 18 in June that nothing in the
new religion law obliges regional executive committees to regard affiliation to
a religious organisation that has re-registered at
the republican level as automatic grounds for re-registering a local community.
She maintained, however, that the State Committee for Religious and Ethnic
Affairs was nevertheless "quickly trying to re-register as many
republic-wide religious organisations as
possible" due to concern from the West.
The chairman of the State Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs,
Stanislav Buko, told Forum 18
from Minsk on 9 September that to date 27 religious organisations
- the Belarusian Orthodox Church and its ten dioceses, the Conference of
Catholic Bishops in Belarus and its four dioceses and two seminaries, the
Judaic Religious Association, the Conference of Churches of Seventh-Day
Adventists and the Pentecostal Union and its six regional branches - had
re-registered at the republican level.
Buko added that the total number of religious organisations liable to re-registration by his committee
under the new law is 140. He said re-registration applications by the Jehovah's
Witnesses, the Union of Judaic Religious Communities and the Baptist Union and
its six regional branches are currently under consideration.
Buko maintained that he was unaware of how
re-registration was progressing at the local level, and pointed to a
forthcoming meeting hosted by his committee when "we shall find out".
He reported that the meeting, to be held on 12 September, is to be attended by
regional religious affairs officials and representatives of religious organisations.
Forum 18 has found, however, that re-registration at the local level is
proceeding very slowly, even for those affiliated to organisations
that have already re-registered at the republican level. Andrei Petrashkevich, the press secretary to the Belarusian Orthodox
Church, told Forum 18 on 25 August that the re-registration of the country's
2,200 Orthodox parishes has "only just begun" following the adoption
of a new standard parish charter.
Cardinal Kazimierz Swiatek,
leader of the Catholic Church in Belarus, told Forum 18 from Pinsk on 4 September that his Church's 400 parishes are
also only now preparing and submitting re-registration documentation after the
adoption of a new standard parish charter. Not one parish has yet
re-registered, he said.
The head of the Judaic Religious Association, Yuri Dorn, confirmed to Forum 18
on 26 August that his organisation had successfully
re-registered at republican level in November 2002, soon after the new religion
law came into force. Yet of its 16 local affiliate organisations
only two have re-registered, he added.
Moisei Ostrovsky, the head
of the Conference of Churches of Seventh-Day Adventists, told Forum 18 on 21
August that his organisation had re-registered at the
republican level on 22 April. Locally, however, re-registration has "only
just started," he remarked, with only eight out of 70 affiliated Adventist
communities having received local re-registration so far.
"Things aren't moving at the local level," Bishop Sergei
Khomich, head of the Pentecostal Union, declared
about the re-registration process. None of the organisation's
approximately 470 affiliate communities has re-registered so far, he told Forum
18 on 21 August, though he acknowledged that he did not know how many have
submitted applications.
The Full Gospel Church has not applied for re-registration at the republican
level, Bishop Aleksandr Sakovich
of the Full Gospel Union told Forum 18 on 5 September. On 16 June, the bishop
wrote an open letter to Buko complaining that local
authorities routinely refuse his Church permission to hold religious events,
with ten congregations "unable to function normally" for the past
three years in Minsk alone (see F18News 1 September 2003). As a result, he
concludes in the letter, "legal personality status is losing its significance
for the activity of our communities".
On 13 June, the chairman of the Baptist Union wrote an open letter to Buko complaining about discriminatory provisions within the
new religion law and stating that "religious communities and organisations cannot accept obligations stipulated by a law
which groundlessly restricts the basic rights and freedoms of citizens to
freedom of conscience and religious belief". Re-registration according to
the new law, Nikolai Sinkovets concluded, therefore
"puts us in a difficult position," since some of the law's provisions
"are incompatible with the religious convictions of believing
citizens".
The press secretary to the Baptist Union, German Rodov,
insisted to Forum 18 on 10 September that his organisation
had not, in fact, submitted any re-registration application to the State
Committee for Religious and Ethnic Affairs. Precisely because there was nothing
in the November 2002 law obliging regional executive committees to re-register
local religious communities by dint of affiliation to a re-registered
republic-wide organisation, he explained, the Baptist
Union had decided "not to re-register at the republican level unless all
our member churches are re-registered first." This process has only just
begun, said Rodov, adding that he did not know how
many local communities had re-registered to date.