Lithuania suspends rendering legal assistance to Belarus

The Lithuanian Ministry of Justice states the information about bank accounts of Belarusian organizations was given due to excessive confidence in the Belarusian agencies.

The ministry suspends rendering legal assistance to the regime of Alyaksandr Lukashenka for an indefinite time protesting against using a request for legal assistance for political harassment DELFI news agency reports.

Human rights activists say these actions led to arrest of Ales Byalyatski, the leader of a Belarusian human rights centre.

Tomas Vaitkevičius, the vice minister of justice, said at a press conference on Thursday that it was true.

According to him, rendering legal assistance to Belarus has been suspended for an indefinite time until more reliable mechanisms of judicial cooperation are found.

“Europe must not have political prisoners. The Ministry of Justice expresses its disappointment with a refusal to fulfill the request for legal assistance until there is a guarantee that the obtained information will not be used for political purposes,” Vaitkevičius said.

According to him, it is the first case when the information provided by Lithuania as part of the international cooperation agreement has led to such results. The vice minister says the actions of Belarus were indecent.

Belarusians noted in the request for legal assistance that this information would be used in connection with suspicion of tax evasion. “This is the first case, which, let me put it straight, evokes scorn for the Belarusian authorities when this instrument is used for political purposes,” Vaitkevičius could not hide his discontent.

He also expressed a hope that the gaps in the legal assistance mechanism would be closed soon and rendering legal assistance would be resumed with certainty that similar things would never happen again.

“I am sure that rendering legal assistance must not be stopped and it would be rendered when it is grounded and needed for the people of both Lithuania and Belarus,” Vaitkevičius said.

They didn’t know it was a human rights activist

Vaitkevičius claims that the Ministry of Justice saw the name in the request for legal assistance, but underestimates an opportunity that this information could be used for political purposes.

“If anything had indicated that the legal assistance can be used for political purposes, we would not have provided it. We have the right not to provide this assistance. We did not turn attention to this (Byalyatski’s activity in the Belarusian opposition – DELFI). This name was not identified as a name of a leader of the opposition movement,” the vice minister admitted.

According to him, the ministry did not know that the legal assistance mechanism could be used to prosecute an opposition member. Vaitkevičius says that “in accordance with the standard procedure”, the ministry must receive this information, but this mechanism broke.

A final decision on providing information to the Belarusian state agencies was taken by the International Law Department of the Ministry of Justice.

Belarus applied directly to banks

According to Vaitkevičius, the Belarusian agencies made requests regarding Byalyatski’s accounts to several Lithuanian commercial banks, but the Ministry of Justice was responsible for the procedure. He noted that banks had the right to refuse to fulfill Belarus’s request but did not do it. Nor did it the Ministry of Justice.

“The Belarusian party made requests directly to Lithuanian banks. In accordance with the procedure, these requests are made through the Ministry of Justice. […] Banks had the requested information. We checked the requests in legal aspect and resent the information to the requesting party. It is a routine procedure. Anyway, banks could have refused to give this information. In this case, a question would have risen if this information should be requested through the court. You know, we live in a free state, unlike Belarusians,” the deputy minister explained.

Vaitkevičius refused to say which banks provided information about Viasna’s accounts to the Belarusian authorities.