Name Eugene Czolij | ||
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Eugene Czolij (born 1959 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada) is a Ukrainian-Canadian lawyer and President of the Ukrainian World Congress. He is married to Anna and they have three children - Melanie, Stephane and Sophie.
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Career
He was called to the Quebec Bar in 1982. He is a senior partner at Lavery, de Billy, one of the largest law firms in Quebec. His legal practice includes corporate and commercial litigation, shareholder oppression remedies, the insolvency of significant corporations, banking litigation and class action suits. He pleads before the Supreme Court of Canada, as well as all court levels in Quebec.
In 2006, he was elected as president of a Ukrainian credit union, the Caisse populaire Desjardins Ukrainienne de Montréal, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Council of Ukrainian Credit Unions of Canada.
Since 2009, he has been a member of the Council of Representatives, East of Montreal, of the Fédération des caisses Desjardins du Québec, the largest cooperative financial group in Canada. Czolij started his activities in organisations of the Ukrainian diaspora in the 1980s in Montreal when he became leader of the Union of Ukrainian Youth. Later he became leader of the World Union of Ukrainian Youth. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.
In 2008, he was elected as president of the Ukrainian World Congress for a five‑year term. The Ukrainian World Congress is the international coordinating body for Ukrainian communities in the diaspora representing the interests of over 20 million Ukrainians. Czolij was reelected to a second five-year term as president of the Ukrainian World Congress at the group’s tenth gathering held in Lviv, Ukraine, in late August 2013.
He took part in a montoring delegation to Ukraine during the presidential elections of 2004 and the parliamentary elections of 2006. As president of the Ukrainian World Congress he addressed in numerous events the Canadian Government, the representatives of the European Union and the UN to support Ukraine’s democratization, Euro-integration and independence. In many visits to Ukraine he advised and supported the new leadership of president Petro Poroshenko.
Since 2005 he was member of the board of the Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky Institute Foundation. He has received several awards, including the Queen Elizabeth II Golden Jubilee Medal, the Order of Merit of Ukraine, and the Shevchenko Medal from the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.