DISINFO: UN publishes a report on Kyiv’s discrimination against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church
SUMMARY
The UN published a report on Kyiv’s discrimination against the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights published a report on religious freedom in Ukraine in which it highlighted this discrimination.
RESPONSE
The claim is patently false, as the UN didn’t publish any report on this subject.
This disinformation story falsely refers to a long document titled Report on the Human Rights Situation in Ukraine – 1 August 2022-31 January 2023, released by the Office of the UN High Commissioner on Human Rights on 24 March 2023. It contains a single paragraph about searches conducted by the SBU (Ukraine’s Security Service) at the Ukrainian Orthodox Church premises and the issue of notices of suspicion to UOC clergy, and a sentence stating: “OHCHR is concerned that the State’s activities targeting the UOC could be discriminatory”. But most of the content of the report refers to massive Russian war crimes in Ukraine, -which are not mentioned at all in the pro-Kremlin reporting.
Distorting the content of prestigious outlets and institutions to make them appear as supporting pro-Kremlin disinformation narratives is a frequent technique of pro-Kremlin outlets.
Pro-Kremlin outlets have a history of false use of images, quotes, or simply inventing things and present it as facts: see our account here.
See also other examples here in our database, such as false claims that IAEA experts confirmed that Zaporizhzhia plant is under Ukrainian attacks, that Russian war prisoners in Ukraine were tortured with electricity according to the UN, that Germany doesn’t trust Zelenskyy according to Der Spiegel, or that The National Interest explained why the US should side with Russia in Ukraine.