In March 2013, the New York Times reported that the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women had failed to agree on a final communiqué because “the Vatican, Iran and Russia” had refused the draft of the joint statement which contained a phrase where “religion, custom and tradition” were called “familiar excuses” for violence against women. The New York Times wrote: “The efforts by the Vatican and Iran to control women are well known. It is not clear what motivates Russia … ” (New York Times 2013). This chapter will try to give an answer to the question of what motivates the hard line of the Russian government on issues of gender and morality. I will argue that it is the Russian Orthodox Church that is the driving force behind the moral agenda of the Russian government, both in the domestic as well as in the international arena, and I will provide a number of examples to substantiate this claim. The political human rights agenda of the Moscow Patriarchate is

expressed by what Agadjanian has called the “inward” and “outward” orientation of the Human Rights Doctrine. The “inward orientation” entails providing a clear guideline to church members on how to deal with human rights issues and how to use this legal instrument for the purpose of protecting the rights of the Church and its members (Agadjanian 2008, 15). As a part of this “inward orientation” the Church avails itself of the human right of religious freedom in order to raise claims within the Russian system concerning church-state relations. In its “outward orientation,” in contrast, the document addresses the human rights discourse more generally and makes a distinctively Orthodox contribution to a national and international debate about human rights. The issues at stake here are not so much religious freedom, but other questions of social welfare and family politics. In this context, Russian Orthodoxy presents itself as majority voice that seeks

to remind the Russian society, the Russian state (and the international community, for that matter) that the Russian Orthodox Church has been a “formative factor” for the Russian cultural ethos, and therefore Christian anthropology, Christian vision of dignity and freedom, Christian

version of rights, must define-at least in a certain degree-the public discourse of values and morality.