Property disputes and Orthodoxy: Orlović and Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia

Though the Iron Curtain came down in 1989/90 and the civil wars in the former Yugoslavia ended in the mid-1990s, outstanding property disputes between rival religious groups arising out of adherence to different jurisdictions or previous dispossession continue to take up the time of the courts – as the following two recent cases show.

In Metropolitan Church of Bessarabia and Nativity of the Virgin Mary Parish v The Republic of Moldova [2019] ECHR 658 [in French], the Nativity Parish had sought recognition in 2005 of its ownership of a plot of land in Mihalaşa to finalise the construction of a church. Continue reading