E/CN.4/2006/5/Add.1 Page 69 exercise of the right to freedom of conscience and religion). The progress of the investigation into this case is being supervised by the Office of the Procurator -General of the Russian Federation. Communication sent on 17 March 2005 318. The Special Rapporteur was informed that, in southern Russia, three confessions regarded as "traditional", namely the Greek Orthodox, the Muslims and the Jews, had all failed to regain their places of worship which were confiscated by the state in Communist times. 319. The Greek Orthodox community in the city of Krasnodar is part of the Moscow Patriarchate and has the support of its local Russian Orthodox bishop. Yet it has failed to get the authorities to return a church it can prove belonged to it, which now houses a state sanitation and disease control department. Indeed, despite having the backing of its local Russian Orthodox bishop, the Greek Orthodox community has unsuccessfully fought to win back its historical church building for eight years. Currently scattered among Russian Orthodox parishes, there were approximately 1,000 practising Greek Orthodox in Krasnodar region. Although they were content to be under the Moscow Patriarchate and currently had access to priests who have a reasonable knowledge of Greek, the Greek Orthodox would be able to worship as one parish led by an ethnic Greek priest if they had their own church. In particular, parishioners could then make their confessions in Greek and obtain commemoration services for the thousands of Greek victims of the 1915 genocide in present-day eastern Turkey and local Stalinist purges directed against Greeks in 1938. 320. Moreover, the Krasnodar’s Progressive Jewish community, another confession usually counted as "traditional" in Russia, had abandoned its nine year struggle to win back a pre-revolutionary synagogue in the city centre that the community once used and which would now be a government trade department. The 70-strong Progressive Jewish congregation is currently able to meet for worship at nearby rented premises, where there would not be enough space at festivals. In late October 2004, Krasnodar region's religious affairs official, Mr. Aleksandr Babskov, reportedly stated tha t he did not have official confirmation that the building in question had ever been a synagogue, and claimed to be unaware of any official claim to it by a religious community. 321. Finally, in the neighbouring region of Stavropol, the local Muslim community had similarly fought in vain for over ten years for the restitution of a prerevolutionary city mosque, which currently houses Stavropol's regional museum. According to a March 2004 statement from the Council of Muslim Religious Organisations in Stavropol City, the region's arbitration court finally refused to hear a case set to decide the issue - after seven months of preliminary deliberations - on the grounds that it was "outside its competency". The local Muslim community was forced to file the suit with the court in the first place, explains the statement, because the Stavropol regional authorities repeatedly refused to acknowledge receipt of a 31 December 1999 instruction issued by Russia's Ministries of Culture and State Property demanding the return of the former mosque to local Muslims. In late October 2004, Mufti Ismail Berdiyev of the Spiritual Directorate of Muslims of KarachaiCherkessia and Stavropol Region maintained that the Stavropol regional authorities'