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Minsk City Economic Court orders New Life Church to pay $83,000 in compensation for environmental damage

The Minsk City Economic Court on July 29 ordered a Protestant community called New Life Church to pay 249 million rubels ($83,000) in compensation for environmental damage, BelaPAN reports.

The Minsk city environment department estimated that the community had caused damage to the environment in this amount by contaminating the area around its prayer house with petroleum products and destroying more than 3,000 square meters of topsoil.

New Life Church was also ordered to pay eight million rubels ($2,700) to the department to reimburse it for its litigation costs.

The community's lawyer, Syarhey Lukanin, condemned the ruling as unfair. "Officers of the city environment department didn't invite New Life Church representatives to watch the taking of soil samples in early December 2009," he told BelaPAN. "We can’t be sure that the samples came from our land and were excessively contaminated."

In addition, the land that now belongs to the community was once occupied by a kolkhoz [collective farming enterprise] and was later used for dumping solid waste, including rusted automobile hulks, Mr. Lukanin said. In 2004, community members removed the waste by themselves.

Although New Life Church will appeal Thursday's ruling, it does not expect a favorable outcome, he said.

The community will not pay because it does not consider itself guilty, Mr. Lukanin stressed.

There are now grounds to charge New Life Church leader Vyachaslaw Hancharenka under the Criminal Code article that penalizes heavy damage to land, he said.

On July 12, the Supreme Court of Belarus rejected an appeal against an environmental penalty of 8,750,000 rubels ($3,000) that a judge of the Maskowski District Court in Minsk imposed on New Life Church in February.

New Life Church, one of the largest communities of the Association of Full Gospel Christians, obtained state registration in December 1992 and is said to have more than 1000 members. In 2002, the community bought a former cowshed together with a four-acre land plot from a kolkhoz. It converted the building into a prayer house and some 500 to 700 people gathered there each Sunday for worship.

The area was later added to the territory of Minsk, and the city government decided to confiscate the plot and ordered New Life Church to sell the former cowshed to the city for 37.6 million rubels, or some $10 per square meter. Officials explained that this amount was what the building had been worth before New Life Church converted it into a prayer house without permission.

New Life Church views the city environment department’s actions as another attempt to force the community to abandon its land and prayer house.