Latvia¶
The Latvian case shows a state settling a church’s foreign tie by statute in the name of security. The threat from across the border is real, and parliament treated the question as one of national defence rather than religious freedom, deciding it quickly and with near unanimity. The law declares the church independent while leaving its doctrine to the church, so the state draws the line between the church’s organisation and its faith, and keeps the organisation under its eye.
The clerk’s briefs¶
From the clerks, for the Patrician’s eyes
Not urgent. Parishioners who still look to the old patriarchate now belong, in law, to a church that has left it, and a neighbour can tell them they are being persecuted. Other churches with authority abroad learn that their ties can be settled by a vote. A later government that wants to settle another community’s ties has its procedure, and the speed of this one suggests it would need little debate. A court challenge, or a settlement the church reaches without the state, would test it.
September 2022: Independence by statute¶
On 8 September 2022 the Saeima voted by 73 to 3, with one abstention, to make the Latvian Orthodox Church independent of Moscow, passing the amendments in two readings the same day. President Egils Levits said the state would recognise the church as “completely independent and autocephalous, and it does not depend on one other church outside Latvia”. He gave as the reason a risk that “the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Church could unilaterally eliminate the full independence” of the Latvian church. The Saeima’s own account adds that the church must notify the state of appointments of its bishops, and that the law “does not affect or interfere with the Church’s doctrine of faith and canon law”. The clerks observe that a parliament has settled a church’s legal independence from a foreign authority, while declaring that it leaves the church’s own law alone.