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- Ελληνικά
MP Panicos Leonidou, head of the Cypriot delegation to the Inter-Parliamentary Assembly of Orthodoxy (IPA) and Member of the International Secretariat of the Assembly, participated in a mission of the Assembly's delegation to the USA. The delegation included the Secretary General of the IOA, Greek MP Mr. Maximos Charakopoulos, Romanian MP Mr. Ioan Vulpescu, Bulgarian MP Mr. Radomir Tcholakov and IOA Advisor Mr. Kostas Mugdalis.
The IOA delegation had separate meetings with representatives of the US Department of State's Office of Religious Freedom and the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, as well as with peer Archbishops of the Ecumenical Patriarchate in the greater Washington DC area. In addition, there was a presentation of the IOA's tribute volume entitled "Hagia Sophia: The Temples of God's Wisdom around the World" and the opening of an exhibition of photographs of the same name at the Bible Museum in Washington, D.C.
During the meetings, Mr. Leonidou said that the visit of the IOA delegation to the US is aimed at highlighting the issue of the conversion of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul into a mosque and condemning the desecration of the ecumenical symbol of Orthodoxy and UNESCO World Heritage Site by the Turkish authorities. He noted that the Cypriot people continue to experience the consequences of the Turkish invasion for forty-nine years, deprived of fundamental human rights and enduring violations of religious freedom and destruction of cultural heritage in the Turkish-occupied territories of the Republic of Cyprus. He noted the IOA's appeal to the US State Department to include this heritage in the list of countries under scrutiny for engaging in or tolerating particularly serious violations of religious freedom.
(Text as sent from the House of Representatives)
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