VILNIUS, June 21, BNS—The Lithuanian parliament Tuesday began consideration of amendments to ensure Lithuanian Jews and their descendants who left Lithuania between the two world wars would enjoy the right to restore their Lithuanian citizenship. After initial presentation of the draft amendment, 92 MPs voted in favor of further consideration, none voted against and one abstained. The decision was adopted to put the proposed amendment up for fast-track consideration Thursday. Conservative MP Andrius Kubilius, leader of the opposition and one of the authors of the amendment, said the law needed amending because the year before last and last year Migration Department officials and courts began demanding Litvaks provide proof they or their ancestors were persecuted in interwar Lithuania.

“Demanding explanations, especially from people of Jewish origin, that their ancestors left in, say, 1935 because they sensed danger is not very humane,” Kubilius commented during presentation of the draft legislation at parliament.

The proposed amendments allow for restoration of citizenship to an individual who left or fled Lithuania before March 11, 1990, except for those who moved away to another part of the Soviet Union after June 15, 1940. “I would like to note we are not proposing anything be changed from the law adopted in 2011 which was successfully implemented until the very end of 2014 and the start of 2015, [before which] dual citizenship was granted under that law to all people of Lithuanian ethnic origin and Jews who had Lithuanian citizenship, and their descendants. We haven’t changed anything, except that we are attempting to solve the problem which arose when public servants began to interpret the standards of law differently. I propose we not argue with the public servants, nor with the Migration Department, but instead simply put things in order, change some of the phrasing so that no one has any uncertainties regarding the will of the legislators,” MP Kubilius said.

The current Lithuanian law on citizenship provides for people who “withdrew” from Lithuania before March 11, 1990, to hold dual citizenship. Recently the administrative courts and the Migration Department have refused to restore citizenship to people who “left” Lithuania in the period between the wars, from 1918 to 1940.

In making the rejections, Migration Department officials have said they’re following a finding by Lithuania’s Constitutional Court and case-law from the administrative courts which allegedly define people who “withdrew” or fled Lithuania before March 11, 1990, as people who quit the country for political reasons, because of opposition to the Soviet regime or because of persecution by that regime. The courts allegedly claimed Lithuanian citizens were not persecuted in Lithuania between 1918 and 1940.

“Perhaps this isn’t really totally clear in the law itself, where the word ‘withdraw’ is used, while the word ‘withdraw’ is defined by the word ‘leave.’ So we’re proposing making that clear, that ‘withdraw’ and ‘leave’ mean the same thing,” Andrius Kubilius said. He added attitudes on granting Lithuanian citizenship hardened over a single case involving a former Lithuania citizen who married a Russian officer and moved to Moscow in 1970, who requested Lithuanian citizenship be restored. “…and the courts exactly in this case began trying to determine whether she voluntarily left, so that the term ‘withdraw’ wouldn’t apply, and so on. And then after that all this sort of thing began. Then they began applying it to the interwar period and so on, but the stories then are completely different,” the conservative MP commented.

According to statistics from the Migration Department, ten Litvaks were refused citizenship in 2014. In 2015 that number came to 76. In just the first quarter of 2016 it came to 97.