“Working out the agenda”: the priest explained why the Russian Orthodox Church was involved in the information campaign around the return of the death penalty

The return of the death penalty in Russia is unlikely, said human rights activist and archbishop of the Apostolic Orthodox Church Grigory Mikhnov-Vaitenko in a conversation with a Rosbalt correspondent. The expert explained why Russia is unlikely to decide to lift the moratorium, and why the ROC has joined in a new information campaign around capital punishment.

“The European Union is one of the key markets in which the Russian Federation is interested and therefore recognizes the ECHR as a super-supreme quasi-judicial instance, to which our legislation is subordinated. I think these are all scarecrows. The time of its introduction will coincide with the beginning of hostilities – not local, but global. And in the latter case, it will be all the same what sanctions are provided for under which article, “Mikhnov-Vaitenko noted.

In his opinion, a series of comments from public figures about the death penalty fit into the general ideological campaign of recent days.

“This is a mechanism of intimidation, like the day before yesterday’s term for Yuri Dmitriev (the historian was sentenced to 15 years in a colony in a ‘pedophile’ case, which human rights activists call falsified – Rosbalt) and yesterday’s liquidation of Memorial (recognized in the Russian Federation by an NGO foreign agent – Rosbalt “)”, – said Mikhnov-Vaitenko.

In his opinion, the authorities “scare” not so much the “liberals” inside the country, as focusing on the outside world, on the eve of the Russia-NATO summit and other negotiations with Western countries. The Russian political elite is raising the stakes by talking about lifting the moratorium on the death penalty, the human rights activist is sure.

According to Mikhnov-Vaitenko, it is no coincidence that the Russian Orthodox Church got involved in the information campaign.

“Previously, it claimed the status of an ideological department, as under the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Unfortunately, today the ROC has sunk to the cleanup department of the executive committee, whose task is to push. There is a common agenda, they are working on it. This is monstrous, because it runs into the deepest contradiction with the book on which they should rely, no matter what anyone says or does. The book is on the side, and the decision of the Plenum of the Central Committee is a table-top manual, ”the priest summed up.

Earlier, the chairman of the Constitutional Court, Valery Zorkin, allowed the return of the death penalty, the moratorium on which, in his opinion, is a concession to Russian legal values. The head of the Constitutional Committee of the Federation Council, Andrei Klishas, ​​called the issue more moral and ethical, rather than legal.

According to Interfax, the ROC stated that its documents do not contain a provision on the need for a complete abolition of the death penalty, although such a measure cannot be regarded as the only guarantee of public safety.