Appeal To Ukraine’s Presidential Candidates

Religious Aminiatration of Muslims of Ukraine “Umma” and Muslim social organisations present their regards to all the Presidential Candidates and suggest a range of proposals for provisions they would like to see in the electoral programmes.

Ukrainian Muslims, regardles sof their ethnic diversity and different political preferences, are united by the bases of Islamic religion, Thus, it is very important that we can practice our religion freely and use our potential in social and proffessional spheres. Our proposals can be divided in two groups, namely current and long-range.

Current proposals

1. Maintaining religious rights and freedoms of all the Ukraine’s confessions, without providing any of them with any special status;

2. State’s non-intervention in the religious affairs;

3. Equal attitude to all the Muslim communities of the country without playing favorites;

4. Create a presidential advisory Council of Churches and Religious Organisations for making their point to the Head of the State. Such Counsil should involve a broader range of representatives than the previous one; as not every willing religious community can send its representative to this Counsil today;

5. According to the law, promote assigning of the land plots for the purposes of building mosques and other religious buildings as well as arranging cemeteries in every populated area where such infrastructure is needed.

Long-range proposals

1. Enable the believers to perform their civil duties without disobeying provisions of their religion;

2. Promote developing rateless banking;

3. Equal attitude in public funding for different confessions, i.e. either provide such funding for all the communities or to none of them.

We also hope that the matters of spiritual and moral renovation in Ukrainian society will also be depicted in the presidential campaign programmes.