Vilnius, May 8, BNS–Lawsuits by Litvaks living in Israel and South Africa regarding Lithuanian citizenship have come to the attention of the Lithuanian parliament. Soon at least two parliamentary committees plan to make inquiries into why Lithuanian Jews who left the country between the two world wars and their offspring have been receiving negative responses to their applications for restoration of Lithuanian citizenship for some time now.
“We want to ask what is truly going on, why now these questions have begun to receive a negative answer. At least the information which is reaching us from the embassy, those explanations are very undiplomatic and are offensive to people. They say you are such and such people, that no one persecuted you. It’s not good to talk that way against the entire backdrop of the Holocaust,” deputy speaker of parliament and chairman of the European Affairs Committee Gediminas Kirkilas told BNS.
The issue of citizenship for Litvaks has been included on the committee’s agenda for next week. Kirkilas said all interested parties would receive a hearing and they would seek a way to solve the issue. “There have been all sorts of strange things in my long experience. As soon as we improve relations with Israel, some sort of little provocation comes up,” Kirkilas, former prime minister of Lithuania, commented on his suspicions regarding the current situation. He said it’s difficult to explain to people why people from the exact same families receive different answers regarding restoration of citizenship.
The parliamentary Law and Order Committee also plans to examine the issue of dual citizenship. Although they haven’t set a date for considering the problem, committee chairman Julius Sabatauskas says it will be added to the agenda for the committee’s next sittings.
Recently Lithuania’s Migration Department has rejected the majority of applications to restore citizenship to people who left Lithuania between 1920 and 1939 and their offspring. According to Lithuania’s law on citizenship, those eligible for restoration of citizenship include people who left Lithuania before March 11, 1990 and acquired foreign citizenship, and their offspring. Approximately 1,000 Jews from the Republic of South Africa have used that law to get Lithuanian citizenship, but around the middle of last year the citizenship restoration process ground to a halt for some people.
Migration specialists cited a finding by the Constitutional Court and administrative court decisions which ruled Lithuanian citizens who left the country before March 11, 1990 meant citizens who left the country for political reasons, for opposing the occupational regime or because of persecution by the regime.
Lithuanian officials claim Jews didn’t experience persecution in the interwar period.
New interior minister Tomas Žilinskas told BNS said a political solution needs to be applied to this issue, because, he claimed, the law is not favorable to people who left Lithuania in the interwar period in these cases. “There is the law on citizenship which contains language about withdrawal. A person who withdrew from Lithuania has to show a reason why he left. He’s supposed to have left for serious reasons, not just for the heck of it, because of persecution or similar reasons,” the minister said.
He also said the Lithuanian Migration Department under the Interior Ministry hasn’t lost a single court case regarding rejecting applications for citizenship by these sorts of people. “The High Administrative Court of Lithuania, it seems, will have the final word on this and will define the rules. As I understood it, they are supposed to issue a verdict in June. That will be how the final legal procedures are defined. The decision won’t be subject to appeal,” minister Žilinskas said.
