Lithuania is consulting with European Union institutions while drafting a law legalising pushbacks of irregular migrants, Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė said.
“We are consulting with the European Commission, [...] we are consulting on changes and other things, but in terms of changes, what we are looking for first of all is to have changes in European law, migration policy as proposed by Lithuania,” Bilotaitė told reporters on Tuesday.
The Interior Ministry later clarified that she meant legislative amendments related to a recent decision of the European Court of Justice (CJEU), when talking about consultations with the EU institutions.
Last summer, Bilotaitė signed a decree instructing border guards to push back irregular migrants trying to cross into Lithuania from Belarus. More than 11,000 people, mostly from the Middle East and Africa, have been stopped from entering Lithuania.
Vilnius accused the Belarusian government of sending migrants in order to pressure the EU, calling it a “hybrid attack”.
Lithuania’s pushback policy has been criticised by human rights groups. The European Court of Justice recently gave a ruling, saying that Lithuania’s pushback policy contradicted EU law by denying migrants the right to seek asylum.
Still, the Ministry of the Interior has said it is working to transpose the pushback policy into national legislation. According to Bilotaitė, the law would allow border guards to use such measures during extreme situations, a state of emergency or war.
Read more: Lithuania moves to enshrine migrant pushbacks in law
There is no time to wait for the EU as a whole to change its migration policy, she said.
“The EU migration policy which exists is one thing, but since the hybrid attack happened, everyone agrees that it does not reflect the current situation and has serious drawbacks, which is why we are initiating changes and we will certainly not back down and we will go down that path to make sure that those changes in the EU law happen,” she said.
The conservative politician said that EU processes were too slow.
“It is very difficult to say [when EU law could change], because in the EU all the processes are moving very slowly, it cannot be that the processes happen here and now, so we have to initiate changes [in Lithuania], because we have to defend ourselves today, we cannot wait a year or two, we need solutions today, we needed them yesterday,” said Bilotaitė.
Read more: Lithuanian volunteer rescuing irregular migrants: ‘I’m told I’m harming my country’ – opinion
No end to pushbacks
While pushbacks are prohibited by international law, Lithuanian officials claim that they are not pushing migrants out, but preventing them from entering the country.
The Fundamental Rights Office of the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, Frontex, has criticised Lithuania for collective pushbacks. According to the Office, this practice is contrary to international law and the European Convention on Human Rights. While the Lithuanian government insists that migrants can apply for asylum at official border checkpoints, the Fundamental Rights Office says this avenue does not work in practice.
However, Bilotaitė says that Lithuania has no plans to change its policies.
“At the moment, I don’t see any preconditions or signals that anything is changing fundamentally. We still see the involvement of officials of the Belarusian regime and organised schemes. As long as we see these threats, there is no chance that we could back down and allow the regime to attack us,” the minister said.
“We certainly do not plan to make any changes because we have to defend ourselves,” she insisted.
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