BORDER SECURITYLithuania Legalizes Border Pushbacks
Lithuania enacted the so-called pushbacks in law, which allows border guards to push back border crossers – that is, push them back across the border – if they do not have the right papers. The move has been heavily criticized, but it is not without precedent in the EU.
A new law comes into effect in Lithuania on May 3 that legalizes so-called pushbacks. As Jurate Juskaite, the director of the Lithuanian Centre for Human Rights explains: “Border guards will be allowed to legally push back irregular migrants, and no independent and individual evaluation [as to whether] these people need asylum or not will be done.”
It enshrines in law the Lithuanian authorities’ practice of sending migrants back over the border immediately after they have crossed. Lithuania has already been doing this since the summer of 2021, when there was a sudden increase in the number of migrants crossing into the Baltic country from the authoritarian state of Belarus. At the time, the Lithuanian government saw itself as under attack from the Belarusian ruler, Alexander Lukashenko.
The EU also described the situation as a “hybrid attack,” and suspected an attempt to destabilize the bloc. Many more migrants were also crossing from Belarus to Poland and Latvia. The accusation was that people from third countries were being lured to Belarus in order to get across the external border into the EU — and that the Belarusian state was helping them do it.
The Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT reports that the new law is intended for application in exceptional circumstances. According to the country’s Interior Ministry, it will also make a clear distinction between natural and instrumentalized migration.
Deployment of Civilian Border Guards
Lithuania has an almost 680-kilometer (423-mile) border with Belarus. It has responded to the situation by installing a border fence along approximately 550 kilometers of that length. Four meters high and equipped with barbed wire, the fence is intended to prevent migrants from entering the European Union illegally. In future, under the new law, the border will also be patrolled by so-called civilian border guards.
Nongovernmental organizations are highly critical of this. The human rights activist Jurate Juskaite says the entry threshold for this job is very low. There is concern about the fact that, under the new law, these border guards are allowed to use force.
Julia Zelvenska is the head of legal support at the European Refugee Council, an umbrella organization of 110 nongovernmental organizations. She warns that this will normalize the use of force, and will lead to migrants being criminalized.
Lithuania is not the only EU country with an arrangement like this. Zelvenska says Hungary also employs civilian “border hunters” — and Hungarian law is regarded as the model for Lithuania’s.
