Religious Freedom in Wartime: The Case of Ukraine

VIRTUAL PANEL DISCUSSION

REGISTER

The panelists will discuss religious freedom in wartime, particularly the case of contemporary Ukraine. They will focus on the recently adopted and controversial Ukrainian law concerning religious organizations with ties to a hostile state – which is generally understood as targeting the Ukrainian Orthodox Church under the Moscow Patriarchate. The presenters will deal with the political context, social expectations, and populism; how the issue affects Russian Orthodox outside Ukraine, particularly in the United States; and both domestic and international legal considerations of human rights, the rule of law, and Europe-Ukraine relations.  The presentations will be in English. They will be followed by a discussion among the presenters, after which they will entertain questions from the public.

(Mis)communication: Religious Freedom and the Russian Church outside of Ukraine
Protodeacon Nicholas Denysenko
Professor of Theology, Valparaiso University in Indiana

Contexts and Undertexts of the New Ukrainian Law Banning the Russian Orthodox Church
Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun
Professor of Ecclesiology, International Relations and Ecumenism, Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm

The Banning of Religious Organizations as a Legal Problem: The Ukrainian Context
Dmytro Vovk
Visiting associate professor, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York

Moderator
Andrew Sorokowski
Shevchenko Scientific Society

About the panelists:

Protodeacon Nicholas Denysenko is Emil and Elfriede Jochum University Professor and Chair and Professor of Theology at Valparaiso University in Indiana. Denysenko is the author of numerous articles and books on liturgical theology and religion in Ukraine, including The Church’s Unholy War: Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine and Orthodoxy (Cascade Books, 2023).

Archimandrite Cyril Hovorun is a professor of ecclesiology, international relations and ecumenism at Sankt Ignatios College, University College Stockholm, and a director of the Huffington Ecumenical Institute at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. A graduate of the Theological Academy in Kyiv and National University in Athens, he accomplished his doctoral studies at Durham University. He was a chairman of the Department for External Church Relations of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, first deputy chairman of the Educational Committee of the Russian Orthodox Church, and later research fellow at Yale and Columbia Universities, visiting professor at the University of Münster in Germany. He is an international fellow at Chester Ronning Centre for the Study of Religion and Public Life at the University of Alberta in Canada and an invited professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome.

Dmytro Vovk is a visiting associate professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University, New York. Vovk has been a rule of law, constitutional law, and religious freedom expert for several international institutions, including the UN Population Fund, the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion or Belief, UN Independent Expert on SOGI issues, the OSCE, several EU projects, and the USAID. He also testified before the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and briefed U.S. State Department institutions. He has served as an expert and academic advisor for the Ukrainian Constitutional Court and the Ukrainian Government. Among his recent publications are the volume Human Dignity, Judicial Reasoning and the Law [italics] (Routledge 2024); the volume “Freedom of religion and gender equality across the OSCE region” for the Review of Faith and International Affairs (2022); the volume “The Soviet and post-Soviet law: failed transition from socialist legality to the rule of law” for the Ideology and Politics Journal (2021); and the volume Religion During the Russian-Ukrainian Conflict (Routledge 2019). Vovk is a co-editor of the ICLRS Talk About: Law and Religion blog.

Andrew Sorokowski was admitted to the California bar in 1980. He served as researcher on religion in Ukraine at Keston College (UK) in 1984-1987. Dr. Sorokowski was managing editor of the journal Harvard Ukrainian Studies from 1993 to 1997. He has taught history at colleges and universities in the US and Ukraine. Retired from a historical research position at the US Department of Justice, he has edited and contributed to works on Ukrainian church history, and published numerous reviews, articles, and translations.