A UN committee has urged Lithuania to ensure that all migrants can apply for asylum and to consider their cases individually.
“The Committee recommends the State party to ensure that all asylum seekers, including those arriving in an irregular manner and in times of emergency, have access to information on asylum procedures, legal aid, and have the right to apply for asylum and be assessed on an individual base, without discrimination, by taking legislative and other measures including the amendment to the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens,” the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) said in its comment on ensuring migrants’ rights in Lithuania.
The committee also noted that detention is only applied as a measure of last resort for asylum seekers and undocumented migrants, following an individual assessment of its reasonableness, necessity and proportionality, and an examination of the alternatives.
Moreover, Lithuanian is advised to take measures to ensure undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in accommodation sites have access to adequate food, clothes, other non-food items, health care including psychosocial services, information on asylum procedures and legal aid in a language they understand.
The committee says it understands the challenges Lithuania is facing over the influx of migrants and asylum seekers but is concerned about reported incidents of “the continued expulsion of asylum seekers and migrants without reviewing their individual situations, including the practice of pushback operations, whereby arriving asylum seekers and migrants, including children and persons in vulnerable situations, have been left in the proximity of the border in dire conditions”.
Earlier this month, the Lithuanian parliament, Seimas, started deliberating amendments to the Law on the State Border and the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens, which would consolidate the existing policy of turning away migrants at the border, which has so far been carried out on the basis of a decree from Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė.
The amendments have already drawn criticism from NGOs saying that the government is proposing only formal changes to the provisions that run counter to EU directives and fail to address the problems identified by the European Court of Justice.
The interior minister says the amendments “make a clear distinction between natural and instrumentalised migration carried out by the Belarusian regime”.
The amendments were proposed in response to a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union, which said last year that Lithuanian law preventing ran counted to European directives when it prevented irregular migrants from applying for asylum and allowed their detention simply for entering the country irregularly.
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