IHRA Has No Outside Door. Lithuania Locked the Inside One.
Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry refused my request that its own IHRA delegation carry documented challenges to Lithuania’s Holocaust record into the Alliance. It relied in part on copies I had sent directly to IHRA, after IHRA had already told me in writing that no external petition process exists.
On October 8, Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs refused to place my documented submissions before the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Decision No. (19.2.3E)3-6315, signed by the Ministry’s Chancellor, Aistė Stakėnienė, gives as one of its reasons that I had copied IHRA’s Secretary General, so that I had “already submitted the statements directly to IHRA.”
Seven weeks earlier, IHRA had told me in writing that no such route exists.
On October 9, I appealed the decision to Lithuania’s Administrative Disputes Commission. The signed appeal and its annexes are public, including the Ministry’s decision and IHRA’s reply.
The door IHRA keeps closed
On May 28, I sent IHRA a petition asking it to review Lithuania’s member-country status. On July 23, I put a direct procedural question to Secretary General Michaela Küchler: by what route does a matter of this kind reach the Heads of Delegation and the expert bodies, is sponsorship by a member country a formal requirement, and if so, what avenue remains open to an individual petitioner? I asked to be told plainly if I was at the wrong door.
On August 20, IHRA confirmed receipt and answered: “There is no process for external submission of petitions.” It described itself as a membership-based organization whose meetings are closed to the public, and said it could not share in-depth procedural details externally. It did not answer the sponsorship question, and it identified no other route.
Receipt confirmed. An external petition procedure ruled out, in the same message.
I then asked Germany to take the petition up through its IHRA delegation. In an email I received on September 24, the German Consulate General in Los Angeles relayed the delegation’s recommendation that I address “the IHRA delegation corresponding to your citizenship.” The reply assumed I was American and pointed to the U.S. delegation. I am also a citizen of Lithuania, the state whose record is at issue.
So I went to Lithuania’s delegation
The same day, I filed a formal request with Arvydas Daunoravičius, the Foreign Ministry official whom IHRA lists as Head of Lithuania’s delegation. I asked the delegation to register the record and forward it unchanged to the IHRA Chair, the Secretary General and the competent expert bodies, without endorsing its contents. The same day I filed statements on Kazys Škirpa and Juozas Ambrazevičius-Brazaitis. On October 5, I added the record set out in “Funhouse Mirrors,” on the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s reading of a 1970 German judgment in defense of Jonas Noreika.
I copied IHRA each time. A copy gives notice and preserves the record. It cannot create a procedure that IHRA says does not exist, and I never treated it as one.
The Ministry registered all four filings. Then it refused them.
What the Ministry decided
The decision rests on three propositions. Lithuanian law, it says, does not oblige the Ministry to forward applicants’ letters to international organizations. Because IHRA’s Secretary General appeared among my copy recipients, I had already submitted the material directly to IHRA, whose contact details are public. And: “Nor is the Ministry aware of the procedures chosen by IHRA.” The translations are mine; the Lithuanian original is Annex 1 of the appeal.
I did not ask anyone to forward mail. I asked Lithuania’s IHRA delegation to decide whether Lithuania would use the channel available to it as a member country. The Ministry recast the request as a forwarding request and refused that. Whether the delegation considered the material, and why it will not carry it, appears nowhere in the decision.
The provision the Ministry cited, Article 11(3)(6) of Lithuania’s Law on Public Administration, allows an authority to leave unexamined a request it lacks the competence to decide. The decision nonetheless states that the Ministry assessed the content of my requests and is not granting them. It does not explain whether it decided the requests on their merits or declined to examine them for lack of competence. Those are different administrative acts, with different consequences under the law.
Lack of competence is a hard claim for this Ministry to make. Its own Regulations list state policy on membership in international organizations among its aims, and charge it with coordinating Lithuania’s priorities and representation positions in those organizations. Its official heads the IHRA delegation. The decision names him as its contact person.
That same decision says the Ministry does not know IHRA’s procedures. Its title renames the organization “Tarptautinis Holokausto aukų atminimo aljansas,” the International Holocaust Victims Remembrance Alliance. The man who represents Lithuania at IHRA works in the Ministry that signed it. Lithuanian public-administration law expects the deciding authority to obtain information from its own structural units instead of leaving the applicant to find it. The decision does not say that the Ministry obtained the procedure from its own Head of Delegation, or from IHRA, before relying on its professed lack of knowledge.
Three answers, one circle
IHRA: there is no process for external petitions. Germany: go to the delegation of your own citizenship. Lithuania: you have already written to IHRA, so we will not carry it.
Taken one at a time, each answer has an administrative explanation. Taken together, they leave a Lithuanian citizen with no route through his own state to place a documented record about that state before the Alliance it belongs to. The record concerns Lithuania’s own institutions. Under the Ministry’s reading, the state whose conduct is documented controls whether the documentation reaches the intergovernmental process. No official needs to have intended that result for it to work.
The gatekeeper is not a bystander. On September 23, I filed a supplemental notice with IHRA concerning the Ministry’s own Paneriai commemoration, which named the Nazi occupation authorities and left out the Lithuanian men who did the shooting. Both language versions of that page, the Lithuanian and the English, are now marked updated September 24 and attribute the liquidation of the Vilna Ghetto to “the Nazi occupation authorities and local collaborators.” Neither revised page identifies those local collaborators. The Ministry that refused my request to use Lithuania’s IHRA delegation is itself the subject of one of the documented complaints.
IHRA has addressed Lithuania before
In 2019, the chairs and recent chairs of IHRA’s expert working groups and committees expressed “grave concern” over the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre’s treatment of Noreika, and urged the government of Lithuania and the Centre to acknowledge and condemn his actions (statement). I documented what followed in “IHRA Was Warned in 2019. Lithuania Did Not Cure.”
Seven years later, the government those experts addressed has refused to use its delegation to carry the follow-up record, while pointing to the informational email copies already sent to IHRA.
What the appeal asks
The appeal does not ask the Commission to decide Holocaust history, to require Lithuania to endorse my material, or to order the delegation to transmit it. It asks the Commission to annul the refusal and require a reasoned decision on the request I actually made: whether Lithuania’s IHRA delegation will place the material before IHRA; if not, on what legal and factual basis; which IHRA procedure or rule the Ministry relies on; and why an informational copy counts as submission when IHRA says no external petition process exists.
An official of Lithuania’s Foreign Ministry heads the country’s IHRA delegation, and the Ministry coordinates Lithuania’s priorities and positions in international organizations. The Ministry has now refused my request to use that delegation, treating informational copies sent to IHRA as direct submission, though IHRA says no external petition process exists. If that is Lithuania’s policy, its delegation should state it to IHRA in Lithuania’s name. If it is not, the Commission should require the Ministry to answer the request it was given.
