Thank you very much, Mr. Chair, vice-chairs, and distinguished members of the committee. It's an honour to appear again before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development.
Today I'll speak on the activities of the office of religious freedom in advancing religious freedom in Ukraine, as well as our efforts to improve the overall situation there.
My travels to Kiev this past month exposed me first-hand to Ukraine's situation, especially the situation affecting a number of the churches. During my short stay, two overriding themes came to the fore.
Churches play an incredibly important role in advancing peaceful dialogue and act as agents of change in Ukraine, but their ability to act freely has been under threat in recent months. My meeting with his Beatitude Patriarch Sviatoslav, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, provided a particularly salient example of this. He described in detail the Yanukovych government's attempts to intimidate the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church and how they threatened to remove that church's ability to operate as a legally valid religious organization, merely because of their presence on the Euromaidan.
Patriarch Sviatoslav told me how his clergy and church-related organizations, such as the Ukrainian Catholic University in Lviv had faced threat after threat from the Ukrainian security services, and how President Yanukovych had ignored the patriarch's attempts to engage in dialogue.
We feared that this situation would only continue to spiral if we did not take action. We were especially concerned for the normalization of church-state relations in Ukraine, given the role that the churches and other faith communities play in Ukrainian society.
Our office has moved quickly to meet with external stakeholders and departmental contacts to discuss avenues of engagement throughout Ukraine, east and west. We are involved in the Ukraine task force that consists of both our development and foreign affairs colleagues, and we have taken positive steps toward developing programming through consultations.
We also hosted a productive strategic discussion with Ukrainian Canadian organizations to identify how to focus this programming so we can maximize its impact on the ground.
Additionally, we have consulted with Polish NGOs who actively operate in Ukraine, offer regional expertise, and will be valuable partners as our programming moves forward.
I should note that I recently came back from meetings in Washington, D.C., many of which focused on the situation in Ukraine and various work that is being done by certain members of the NGO community there.
In closing, I would like to highlight again the urgent opportunity presented to us now. People's most basic rights, including religious freedom, need to be guaranteed. I'm confident that the department and our office can move forward in developing a robust strategy and contribute to the democratic transition in Ukraine where the churches and other faith communities will play an important role.
Thank you for the opportunity to present again before the committee, Mr. Chair. I look forward to the committee's questions.