As the Lithuanian Migration Department and the courts issue rejections on applications for Lithuanian citizenship by Litvaks, parliamentarians are preparing to amend the Lithuanian law on citizenship, even though, they say, the current law provides for granting citizenship to the aforementioned people.
The Lithuanian parliament’s European Affairs Committee met Wednesday and decided to form a working group to prepare the amendment to the law.
Conservative opposition leader Andrius Kubilius proposed expanding the existing definition in the law on who should be considered a person who left Lithuania before March 11, 1990.
The current law defines it thus: “A person who withdrew from Lithuania before March 11, 1990; a person who had Lithuanian citizenship before June 15, 1940 and his offspring, who left the territory of the current Republic of Lithuania before March 11, 1990, for permanent residence in another country if their permanent place of residence was not in Lithuania on March 11, 1990.”
Kubilius suggested adding the phrase: “without respect to the reason for their departure, except in the case of voluntary departure to the former USSR.”
The law on citizenship provides for dual citizenship for those who left Lithuania before March 11, 1990, although the Lithuanian courts and the Migration Department have been rejecting recently applications for restoration of citizenship to those who left Lithuania in the period between the wars, from 1918 to 1940.
Migration officials have been basing their negative decisions on a Constitutional Court finding and case-law from the administrative courts which define the category of those who left Lithuania before March 11, 1990, as former Lithuanian citizens who left the country for political reasons, for opposing the occupational regime and because of persecution by that regime. They say Lithuanian citizens were not persecuted in Lithuanian between 1918 and 1940.
MP Emanuelis Zingeris says this view is unfair to Lithuanian Jews.
“My mother Paulina Tatarskytė was sent by her family as early as 1937 to stand in line in front of the embassies and ask for visas. The Americans were handing out more than 200 visas per year, and the English embassy issued 120 visas to Palestine to flee the approaching Nazis. Jews were caught in a lethal trap before the war. Ships on which émigrés fled were sent back from American shores to Nazi-occupied Europe while Lithuania was still independent. Lithuanian Jews tried to join the line of Polish Jewish refugees whom Sugihara issued visas but were thrown out of the queue, there was nowhere to go,” Zingeris said at the meeting of the European Affairs Committee.
According to the Lithuanian Migration Department, the applications for Lithuania citizenship of 10 Litvaks were rejected in 2014, applications by 76 Litvaks were rejected in 2015, and just in the first quarter of this year 97 applications by Litvaks were rejected.
“I think that what we have here is a classic example of activities by Lithuanian bureaucrats harmful to the state,” liberal Arminas Lydeka said during the committee meeting.
He said no amendment was needed because the law contains no provision for considering the reason a citizen left the country for restoration of citizenship.
“In my assessment, the law doesn’t need changing, it’s completely clear and simple, it’s laid out definitively and the intent of the legislators is clearly expressed. But some migration system official decided he was cleverer than the law and will add his contribution,” he said, and proposed the new interior minister read out loud to Migration Department officials the provisions of law so they understand it.
Interior minister Elvinas Jankevičius who was at the meeting approved of the proposal to amend the law so there wouldn’t be any leeway in interpreting its provisions.
European Affairs Committee chairman social democrat Gediminas Kirkilas said the current situation is harmful to Lithuania.
During World War II the Nazis, often with the help of Lithuanian collaborators, murdered 90 percent of approximately 208,000 Lithuanian Jews. Over 800 Lithuanians have been recognized as Righteous Gentiles for saving Jews.
BNS republished on Delfi.lt, full story here.