The Lithuanian government approved on Wednesday the Interior Ministry's proposal to formalise in law the policy of turning away irregular migrants at the border.
Currently, border guards are doing it on the basis of a decree signed by the interior minister in August 2021 amid an influx of irregular migration from neighbouring Belarus.
Critics say that the practice effectively amounts to expulsions, which violates international law. The Lithuanian government, meanwhile, calls the practise “denying entry to aliens”, even though sometimes migrants are pushed out after they have crossed into Lithuania.
The draft amendments to the Law on the State Border and Its Guard and to the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens will now be sent to the parliament, Seimas. If passed, the new legislation will take effect on June 1.
“EU law is lagging behind developments,” Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė said in a press release on Wednesday.
“Therefore, we must have national measures to defend ourselves against hybrid attacks and the instrumentalisation of migration, and these measures have to be enshrined in law,” she said, adding that Estonia and Finland were drafting similar legislation.
The amendments would allow the authorities to deny entry to foreign nationals who intend to or have crossed the state border outside designated places or in violation of the border crossing procedure.
Deputy Interior Minister Arnoldas Abramavičius says that the law would only apply when Lithuania declares an extreme situation.
Abramavičius told LRT RADIO on Wednesday morning that although a fence that Lithuania has constructed alongside its border with Belarus is keeping migrants away, the situation needs to be legally regulated.
“We think it is necessary to regulate the situation, because we are talking about a continuing influx of migrants,” he said.
The bill states that the provision would be applied on an individual basis and would not prevent people fleeing military aggression or persecution to get humanitarian access to the Lithuanian territory.
Moreover, foreigners denied entry would be entitled to emergency assistance, if they needed it.
The proposed amendments to the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens would also allow foreign nationals to apply for asylum, regardless of whether they entered Lithuania regularly or not.
The bill would also abolish the provision, present in the minister’s decree, that asylum seekers can be detained if they enter Lithuania irregularly.
These changes are proposed in light of last year’s ruling by the EU Court of Justice that Lithuania’s legislation detaining and preventing irregular migrants from applying for asylum runs counter to European directives.
Rights groups: change in form, but not in substance
Rights organisations insist that the Interior Ministry’s proposed draft legislation on migrants is only formally amending provisions that run counter to EU directives.
Viktor Ostrovnoj of the Lithuanian Red Cross says that the ministry, on the one hand, suggests scrapping provisions on asylum applications and detention that are incompatible with EU law, but on the other hand, the issues identified by the EU Court of Justice remain unresolved.
“To summarise, through one bill, the Interior Ministry discards the provisions referred to by the CJEU, but through the other bill, it basically puts in place the same restrictions, but in a different law and in different words,” Ostrovnoj told BNS.
“The problems identified by the court remain, which is why I call these amendments formal,” he added.
Erika Leonaitė, head of the Seimas Ombudspersons’ Office, agrees, saying that although the proposed legislation removes the restrictions on asylum, as ordered by the CJEU, it cements in law the practice of turning away irregular migrants at the border.
“It seems that there will have to be an assessment, right on the border, of whether or not a person is fleeing persecution,” Leonaitė told BNS.
“When it comes to persecution, it could be a person from Iraq, for example, who is fleeing persecution on the grounds of sexual orientation, or a woman who is fleeing from a country where her daughter will have to undergo a compulsory genital mutilation procedure,” the Seimas Ombudsperson said.
“At least in the Scandinavian countries, this is recognised as persecution on the grounds of gender. How will all this be determined?” she added.
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