Lithuania has come under fire from the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) for its treatment of migrants crossing into the country from its neighbour, Belarus.
Last year Lithuania introduced a law whereby anyone found crossing its borders irregularly can be detained. The law also denies asylum claims.
The Eastern European nation has claimed that such crossings pose a threat to its national security and has refused to back down despite condemnation from the EU.
Lithuania will ignore the EU top court’s verdict and will continue to execute pushbacks against migrants sent to Lithuania by Belarus and Lukashenko.
Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė says Lithuania will also continue detaining migrants
She says its a matter of national security pic.twitter.com/S2sXxLKiqx
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 4, 2022
Authorities claim that the country is experiencing a large increase in the number of people crossing illegally into its territory.
Lithunanian Minister of the Interior, Agnė Bilotaitė, said,
“Lithuania has taken all important decisions and measures to protect its national security and the European Union’s external border”
She continued,
“right now we don’t see the situation changing significantly to the point where we can back away from our decisions. Lithuania will certainly defend itself if such threats persist,”
It was reported that 1,700 people had crossed into Lithuania illegally from Belarus in the first half of last year, 1,000 of these in the month of July alone. These numbers represent a 210% increase in the number of such border crossings compared to figures for 2020.
EU’s top court rules that the measures Lithuania took to stop the giant flow of migrants Belarus sent in a hybrid warfare attack last year, are incompatible with EU law.
Lithuania was obliged to grant the migrants entry & processing their asylum claims. pic.twitter.com/zM4vgWjpid
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) July 4, 2022
The CJEU issued a statement after finding that Lithuania’s actions are in breach of the EU’s standards for the treatment of migrants saying,
”An applicant for international protection can be detained only when, after an individual assessment of each specific case, it becomes necessary, and if it is not possible to use milder measures,”
It further stated that,
“A threat to national security or public order can be used as a justification for detention only if a person’s behaviour causes a real, present, and sufficiently large threat to the fundamental public interest or to the internal or external security of the Member State concerned,”.
Amnesty International released a document criticising the law and the nature of its implementation saying “The overwhelming majority of people in Lithuania’s Foreigners’ Registration Centres were detained under the new legislation in a regime of “temporary accommodation without freedom of movement”, rather than under a formal detention order from a court.
Amnesty claims Lithuania’s actions deprive “people of their liberty beyond the close confines of the centres amounts to detention as defined under EU and international law. By using the legal fiction of depicting detention as “temporary accommodation”, Lithuanian lawmakers sought to deprive refugees and migrants of key procedural safeguards against arbitrary detention.”