NORWAY
September 17, 2024
By Guest Contributor - Opinion
On 4 March 2024, the Oslo District Court ruled against the Jehovah’s Witnesses and upheld previous decisions of the government and the State Administrator of Oslo and Viken who arbitrarily revoked the registration of Jehovah’s Witnesses present in Norway for over 130 years and put an end to their eligibility for state grants they had received for 30 years, writes Willy Fautre, Human Rights Without Frontiers.
The reason was the shunning policy of the movement, a teaching recommending that its members do not associate with those who have been excluded from the community as unrepentant of serious sins, or have publicly left it and act against it out of disgruntlement. In this matter, Norway’s judgment runs counter to dozens of decisions on shunning by jurisdictions in other countries, including supreme courts. Legal experts and scholars in religious studies in Norway and abroad agree that their deregistration is arbitrary and is based on ill-founded grounds. They also stress that the decision will have a “stigmatizing effect” on the association and its members while the community will lose inter alia its right to celebrate legal marriages with civil effects, which may be considered discriminatory.
Jehovah’s Witnesses have been state-recognized as a religious organization in Norway since 1985 and no criminal case could be invoked to take such a radical decision as their sudden deregistration leading to the loss of approximately 1.6 million EUR every year. An appeal has been lodged.
The legal dimension of the court decision has been extensively analyzed and criticized by Massimo Introvigne and the undersigned in “Bitter Winter” and “Religion News Service”.
State subsidies in Norway are not a gift. The Lutheran Church of Norway, which is a state church, is supported by the government with transfers of money proportional to the number of its members. For the sake of coherence and non-discrimination, the Constitution mandates that to respect the principle of equality other religions should receive the same proportional subsidies. More than 700 religious communities receive state grants in Norway, including Orthodox parishes subordinated to Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and all Rus’ who blessed Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Are Jehovah’s Witnesses more dangerous than another religious entity of foreign origin registered in Norway since 1996 and eligible to state subsidies, the Russian Orthodox Church?
In recent years, the Orthodox Church of Russia has acquired properties in Norway next to military bases, which has been a source of concern since the beginning of Putin’s war on Ukraine. In 2017–2021, some properties were acquired by the Russian Orthodox Church in the coastal area of Rogalan.
According to cadastral data, the Orthodox Church of Russia purchased in 2017 a building in the town of Sherrey (Bergen community), located on a hill three kilometers from Haakonsvern, which offers a view onto the main base of the Royal Norwegian Navy and the largest naval base in the Nordic area. Before the acquisition of this house, the religious community was located in the city center. The Orthodox priest in Bergen, Dimitry Ostanin, is Ukrainian and was appointed by Patriarch Kirill of Moscow and All Rus’ in 2008 when the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) was fully subordinated to him. Before that, he had served in Kaliningrad and Smolensk.
In the town of Stavanger, the former priest of the local community of the Russian Orthodox Church has a property near the NATO Joint Warfare Centre (JWC) in Jatta, according to Dagbladet. It is located just one kilometer from an important military building, about fifteen minutes walk. That NATO Centre celebrated its 20th anniversary during a formal ceremony on 26 October 2023. Over the last two decades, the JWC has planned and delivered more than 100 exercises and training events and ensure that NATO’s commanders and their staffs are well-prepared and ready to respond to any mission, whenever and wherever the call may come.
The Russian Orthodox Church also has a parish in Trondheim. On 21 March 2021, the first Orthodox service in the city was celebrated for almost a thousand years as part of the celebrations of the feast of the Triumph of Orthodoxy at the parish of the Holy Princess Anna of Novgorod, in Russia. News of this important event in the life of Orthodox Christians in Norway was shown on the Russian The Saviour and Unity TV channels.
In 2015, the Russian Orthodox Church also bought a property in Kirkenes (Finnmark county) in the far north-east of Norway, on the border with Russia.
In addition, the Moscow Patriarchate sponsors work in Tromsø in northern Norway and in the Svalbard islands, also known as Spitzbergen. In 1996, the Moscow Patriarchate established a parish in Oslo. Among all Orthodox Churches in Norway, the parish of St. Olga in Oslo, is currently the largest one; another parish under the Moscow Patriarchate in the capital city is Saint Hallvard.
The presence of Orthodox Churches subordinated to the Russian Orthodox Church/ Moscow Patriarchate in EU countries has raised national security concerns because in a number of cases they were suspected or accused of serving as relays for Putin’s propaganda or Russia’s spying activities.
Czechia, Estonia, Lithuania, Sweden and Ukraine have taken various measures to anticipate or tackle security risks, including with the assistance of the Patriarchate of Constantinople.In Norway, a historical Orthodox parish dedicated to St. Nicholas under the Patriarchate of Constantinople was founded in Oslo in 1931 by a small group of Russian refugees who fled the Bolshevik Revolution.In the light of security threats attributed to the Russian Orthodox Church/ Moscow Patriarchate in several European countries, the deregistration in Norway of the peaceful and law-abiding movement of Jehovah’s Witnesses as a state-recognized religious association appears as discriminatory. It is even more ununderstandable with regard to Oslo’s inaction towards the Russian Orthodox Church, which remains registered and goes on receiving state grants. Certainly the Jehovah’s Witnesses do not deserve less than that.
Further reading about FORB in this country on HRWF website.
No comments:
Post a Comment