Report on Violations of the Rights of Orthodox Christians in Europe in 2015

June 22, 2016. The Centre for Monitoring the Rights and Freedom of Orthodox Christians in Europe publishes its annual report for the year 2015.

Monitoring the rights and freedom of Orthodox Christians in Europe within 47 countries of the Council of Europe means registering violations of freedoms of conscience, expression, assembly and other freedoms and rights. Usually violations occur as defamation, humiliation, hate speech and action, discrimination, intolerance, hostility against Orthodox priests, Church stuff or Orthodox believers. The Centre is observing only the violations, which are related directly or indirectly to the Orthodox Christian faith or morality.

As rule at the end of each chapter of the report it is presented the official reaction of the local Churches to the violations of rights of their believers in order to inform different national and international institutions about such cases. The appearance of such reactions speaks about serious attitude of communities to violations which happen.

This report is prepared on the basis of open sources accessible in the Internet and contains references to the sources. The preference, as rule, is given to the primary sources – websites of Orthodox Local Churches, dioceses and parishes, Church-linked media.

In 2015 the CRFO cooperated with different human rights’ defenders such as organizations «Public Advocacy» and «Forpost Advocacy» from Ukraine, Institute «State and Religion» from Russia and used the materials of UN, OSCE, the Council of Europe and the European Union.

This report could not cover all facts due to the lack of information about different countries and to the difficulty of languages. It is necessary to recognize that a lot of information on the violations of the Orthodox Christians in Europe is not accessible in English. Therefore, it is very much welcomed any information that can be sent to the Center of Monitoring about the violations of the rights of Orthodox Christians in 2016 in Europe and which can also complete the present report.

Full text of the report is avaible here:

annual_report_2015.pdf