The European Conservative has published an interview with lawyer Robert Amsterdam about his representation of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC). An excerpt can be read below:
Despite the fact that the UOC cut ties with Moscow and its Patriarch Kirill in May 2022, Zelensky’s government has raided churches, arrested priests and other clergy, and in October, the Ukrainian Parliament proposed outlawing the OUC entirely.
The European Conservative spoke to Bob Amsterdam, the lawyer representing the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, who is leading the church’s international response against the proposal to ban the church’s activities in Ukraine. He is the founder of Amsterdam & Partners LLP, a boutique international law firm with offices in London and Washington, DC. He has extensive experience in the region, having been arrested by Vladimir Putin in Moscow and having defended Ilya Ponomarev, an exiled Russian State Duma Deputy who was subsequently granted Ukrainian citizenship and is now fighting against Russia as part of Ukraine’s Territorial Defense Forces.
The government crackdown has seen Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) clergy members arrested and some stripped of their citizenship in Ukraine. What is the most egregious single case you are aware of against a clergy member by the Zelensky government?
Sadly, there have been many, many cases of persecution against UOC members over the past few years, with multiple clergy members being harassed or jailed.The attacks on the elderly, senior clergy, or metropolitans are some of the most egregious. For the crime of having one flyer on his computer, which he believes was planted by the secret police and never distributed, Metropolitan Jonathan of Tulchyn and Bratslav, who was 75 years old and a famous composer, has been sentenced to five years in jail.