UOC comments on court annulment of DESS “expert review”

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The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has published a clarification from its Legal Department in response to attempts to distort the meaning of the appellate court’s ruling in the case concerning the religious expert review of the Statute on the governance of the UOC. This was reported on May 2, 2026, by the UOC’s Information and Education Department.

On April 6, 2026, the Sixth Administrative Court of Appeal of Ukraine found the inaction of the State Service of Ukraine for Ethnopolitics and Freedom of Conscience (DESS) unlawful and also ruled that the actions of its head, Viktor Yelensky, were illegal. The court annulled DESS Order No. N-8/11 of January 27, 2023, which had approved the conclusion of the religious expert review of the UOC Statute.

According to the UOC’s Legal Department, representatives of the state service are now attempting to misrepresent the ruling. “The claim that the religious expert review was supposedly ‘not annulled,’ and that only the order was revoked, does not correspond to the actual content of the court’s decision,” the lawyers stated.

They emphasize that in paragraph 30 of the ruling, the court explicitly noted that the procedural violation was substantial, as it “renders both the conclusion of the religious expert review and the order defective.” In paragraph 31, the court clarified that it did not declare the conclusion invalid solely for a formal reason: without the corresponding order, the conclusion has no independent legal force.

As previously reported, the appellate court annulled the findings of the DESS “expert review” of the UOC Statute. The court also established that the UOC’s motion to recuse members of the expert group had been properly filed, but no procedural decision on it was ever made – and this omission was recognized as unlawful inaction.

The court dismissed DESS’s references to informational materials published on its website, noting that such materials are not procedural acts and do not constitute a decision on the merits of the recusal request.

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