“Our International Secretariat takes place in the shadow of the war in Ukraine, which unfortunately threatens to erect a new curtain of division of Europe, but also of the Orthodox world.”
The above was stressed by the Secretary-General of the Interparliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy (IAO), a member of the Greek Parliament, Dr. Maximos Charakopoulos, opening the meeting of the International Secretariat of the institution held in Teca Brera in Milan.
The meeting of the International Secretariat was attended by parliamentarians from the parliaments of Greece, Egypt, Armenia, Bulgaria, Skopje, Jordan, Cyprus, Moldova, Poland, and Syria, while the members of the Russian Duma, Belarus, and Serbia participated online.
At the beginning of the meeting, Maximos Charakopoulos censored the presence of a new member of the Russian delegation who appeared wearing a t-shirt with the emblem of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the “Z”, and urged the withdrawal or change of clothing from the MP, in order for the work of the International Secretariat to continue, as it did in the end.
Maximos Charakopoulos underlined that everyone’s duty is to defend the prestige of the international institution of the Orthodox, especially now that two founding members of the IAO, Russia, and Ukraine, are at war.
“As IAO we are against the prevalence of the doctrine that the law of power is superior to the force of international law. And we’ve proven that many times before.
For example, our position on peace in Syria was endangered by the total disintegration, by the action of the jihadists and other forces promoting their own interests. We proved this with our positions on Turkey’s stance, both with the arbitrary conversions of Christian churches and especially of Hagia Sophia, into mosques, as well as with its policy on the Cyprus issue.
We have proved this a long time ago with the NATO war against Serbia. These positions against war and in favor of the law and the territorial integrity of all states are positions of principle, which we continue to defend to this day without derogations.
Because if we didn’t, we would be unreliable, and we would undermine the international prestige of the IAO, which with so much effort and with such consistency, we managed to highlight the previous years,” he noted.
