Lithuanian Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė said that European Commissioner for Home Affairs Ylva Johansson did not call for changes to Lithuania's current laws allowing border guards to turn away migrants.
“There was no discussion that something should be relaxed,” Bilotaitė told reporters after she met with Johansson on Thursday.
Read more: EU mulls challenging pushback laws in Lithuania and Poland
“There are some questions, but we do not have any official or unofficial calls to change our legislation,” she said, adding that Johansson “expressed her full support for Lithuania”.
On Wednesday, the Brussels-based news website EUobserver reported that the European Commission will likely demand that Poland, Latvia, and Lithuania tweak their laws that allow pushing migrants back into Belarus.
“We are still in assessment, but I think that we will ask for amendments in some of the legislations,” it quoted Johansson as saying.
She did not specify when the Commission might demand these changes or on which points.
In early August, Lithuanian border guards started redirecting migrants attempting to cross the country’s border to official border checkpoints, where they could ask for asylum. Since then, around 6,320 people have not been allowed to enter Lithuania from Belarus.
Some critics say that these actions can be considered as pushbacks that violate the European Convention on Human Rights.
But according to Lithuanian officials, they are preventing migrants from entering the Lithuanian territory rather than pushing them back into Belarus.
“Our duty [...] is to defend the EU's external border, which is what we are doing, and we are also defending our national security,” Bilotaitė said.
Read more: Migration crisis in Baltics and Poland
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