Interior Minister Agne Bilotaitė said the detention of migrants, deemed unconstitutional by a Lithuanian court on Wednesday, was necessary to protect the country.
“Those were necessary measures, which Lithuania had to take in order to protect national security and not to turn into a public thoroughfare [of irregular migration],” she told reporters on Wednesday.
Earlier on Wednesday, the country’s Constitutional Court ruled that the detention of all migrants who crossed the border irregularly was unconstitutional.
Further reading
Bilotaitė said that the Interior Ministry's lawyers would assess the arguments set out in the ruling of the Constitutional Court and then make decisions. She also noted that some of the provisions on which the court had ruled were invalid and that the situation had changed since the beginning of the migration crisis in 2021.
“We had no other means of defence, we did not have a physical barrier, we did not have border surveillance systems and we did not have a decision to turn around or to refuse entry to persons who were entering Lithuania illegally," the minister said.
Read more: Migration crisis in Baltics and Poland
She also said that the provisions of the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens, which were deemed unconstitutional, were not her sole responsibility, as the respective amendments were adopted by the Seimas and signed by the president.
According to the Constitutional Court, the Seimas had the right to impose certain restrictions on irregular migrants, but "the application of the same measure to all asylum seekers, ie temporarily accommodation of all asylum seekers in specified places without the right to move around in the territory of Lithuania, did not allow for an individual assessment of each person's situation and their threat to the interests of the state and society".
The ruling came in response to an Iraqi national's complaint and request for the law's review, who wanted the court to acknowledge that his detention from August 1, 2021, to February 3, 2022, was unlawful.
Under the existing law in Lithuania, asylum seekers are placed in special centres without the right to free movement until authorities decide whether to grant the person formal entry into the country. The law only applies if the country has declared an extreme situation due to an influx of irregular migration and cannot exceed six months.
In 2021, almost 4,200 people entered Lithuania irregularly in what Baltic officials and Brussels described as an attack orchestrated by the Minsk regime in response to sanctions.
Newsletter
Every Friday morning.
