Humanitarian Organization Pushes Back Against European Country's Decision to Turn Away Migrants
The Red Cross warned Wednesday that Lithuania’s decision to turn away immigrants attempting to cross in from neighboring Belarus does not comply with international law.
Lithuania, a member of the European Union, has faced a surge of mostly Asian migrants in the past few months.
It says that this is due to retaliation by Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko after the EU put sanctions on his country over an air piracy incident.
The Lithuanian Interior Ministry this week distributed a video shot from a helicopter showing large groups of immigrants being escorted to Lithuania’s border by Belarus border guard vehicles.
On Tuesday, Lithuania said it reserved the right to use force to stop such illegal immigration and has turned away 180 people attempting to enter the country.
But rights groups claim that all nations have an obligation to protect vulnerable people.
“Pushbacks of people seeking asylum are not compatible with the Geneva Convention on Refugee Status, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and other human rights instruments,” Egle Samuchovaite, program director for Lithuania’s Red Cross, told The Associated Press.
Samuchovaite also claimed that rejecting the admission of vulnerable people into the country would put them into an unsafe environment, trapped between two countries.
“In the absence of a physical border barrier with Belarus, the question arises as to how to ensure that there is no disproportionate use of force against asylum seekers, which by any means could not be justified,” she said.
The program director also added, however, that the Red Cross understands the state’s challenges in protecting its border.
Lithuania has no physical barriers for its almost 679-kilometer long border with Belarus.
Another 35 people crossed into Lithuania illegally on Wednesday, according to the State Border Guard Service, but this was significantly lower than the triple-digit numbers of previous days.
Belarus claimed Wednesday that a “non-Slavic” person died from injuries at a border town but Lithuania dismissed the report as propaganda from a hostile regime.
“This is nonsense, a brother Grimm fairy tale,” Lithuania Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite told reporters.
Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas said called the report “an obvious provocation.
“Lithuania is under hybrid attack and spreading such information is a classic example of this process.”
Some 4,090 migrants, most of them from Iraq, have crossed this year from Belarus into Lithuania, a nation of less than 3 million.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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