IHRA Has the Record. Now It Must Decide.

In April 2019, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance warned Lithuania about its own state historical institution.

The statement was not a Plenary consensus decision. But neither was it marginal. Its signature block opened with Ambassador Georges Santer, then Chair of IHRA; Professor Yehuda Bauer, its Honorary Chair; and Dr. Wichert ten Have, its adviser. They were followed by the sitting and former chairs of IHRA’s expert working groups and committees.

They named the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania. They named Jonas Noreika. They wrote that documentary sources indicated his key role in the ghettoization and expropriation of Jews in the Šiauliai district. They criticized the Centre for suggesting that he had rescued Jews without evidence of his direct participation in any rescue. And they connected the issue to IHRA’s own Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion.

Seven years have passed.

Lithuania remains an IHRA Member Country. The warning remains on IHRA’s website. Lithuania’s Member Country page remains elsewhere on the same site. There is no public record explaining whether the warning was answered, whether the Centre corrected anything, or whether IHRA considers the matter resolved.

That is the decision IHRA must now make.

It should decide publicly whether Lithuania has addressed the substance of the 2019 warning. If it has not, IHRA should refer the matter to its expert bodies, ask Lithuania for a written response, and publish that response beside the documentary record.

This month gives the question urgency.

On August 26, a Lithuanian court is scheduled to hear the case of Artur Fridman, a Lithuanian Jewish citizen facing a 220-page indictment over a Facebook post written at his grandfather’s grave. His grandfather fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. The historical authority behind the charge appears to run back to the same state institution IHRA’s experts publicly challenged in 2019. Lithuania was asked in writing whether that institution supplied or shaped evidence in the case, and did not say whether it had.

I described that problem in The Witness IHRA Already Warned About. Grant Gochin described the procedural consequence in IHRA Was Warned in 2019. Lithuania Did Not Cure.

Meanwhile, the Lithuanian state has still not punished a Lithuanian Holocaust perpetrator for participating in the murder of Jews.

None of this requires IHRA to become a court. It never was one, and nobody serious is asking it to pretend otherwise.

IHRA can ask Lithuania, in writing, what it did about the 2019 statement. It can ask which claims were corrected, withdrawn or independently reviewed. It can ask whether the Genocide Centre still maintains that Noreika rescued Jews. It can ask whether that institution is supplying historical authority, directly or indirectly, in the prosecution of a Jewish citizen. It can then refer the matter to its expert bodies, publish whatever Lithuania sends back, and place that answer beside the evidence its own experts already cited.

Every IHRA Member Country is asked to supply information concerning Holocaust education, remembrance and research. IHRA can ask that Lithuania’s reporting address the warning directly rather than continue to pass over it.

The institutional vocabulary already exists. IHRA has adopted, by consensus, a statement condemning the rehabilitation of persons complicit in the crimes of the Holocaust and the genocide of the Roma.

What does not yet exist is a public record showing that IHRA acted after its own warning remained publicly unresolved.

I have written a longer piece explaining why this particular silence worries me more than it otherwise might. It is called The Guarantor That Would Not Decide, and it is drawn from the League of Nations archive in Geneva, from material Grant Gochin has spent months assembling and which we have examined together at length. The documentary record is one we studied jointly. The argument I draw from it is mine.

Here is the short version.

Lithuania entered the international order after making extensive promises to its Jews, beginning with an eight-point undertaking given to the Committee of Jewish Delegations at the Paris Peace Conference in August 1919 and a written assurance the following year that those rights would be incorporated into the Constitution.

Then it went further. On May 12, 1922, Lithuania made a formal Declaration concerning the protection of minorities before the Council of the League of Nations. Article 1 recognized its provisions as fundamental laws of Lithuania and declared that no law, regulation or official action could prevail over them. Article 4 protected the use of minority languages in private life, commerce, religion, the press and public meetings, and required adequate facilities for their use before the courts. On December 11, 1923, the Council formally placed that Declaration under the League’s guarantee.

This was not a handshake. It was an international instrument placed above ordinary Lithuanian legislation.

What followed is preserved in the Geneva archive: an electoral interpretation that produced legal opinions from three eminent European jurists, one of whom described the result as the crushing of minorities; a parliamentary formula in December 1924 expressly excluding minorities from commissions; Jewish nominations answered with vietų nėra, there are no places; and a joint Jewish, Polish and German parliamentary challenge stating that eleven assertions made before the League by Dovas Zaunius, Lithuania’s representative, did not correspond to reality.

The document reached the League. It was received, registered and circulated through the offices responsible for minority protection. An internal minute then concluded that it could not be raised in connection with the pending petition. A copy was sent, “for information,” to the official whose account it challenged.

À titre d’information.

For information.

In September 1925, the Council said it relied on the prudence of the Lithuanian government and expressed the hope that Lithuania would dispel the apprehensions of its minorities. That was the result. No finding, no supervision, no timetable, and nothing identified to follow if the promise went unfulfilled.

Prudence was not a decision. Hope was not enforcement.

I grew up in the Soviet Union, and I know what an official narrative looks like from the inside. A state does not have to announce that it has constructed one. It only has to establish the institution that certifies the story, keep that institution beyond meaningful review, and treat anyone who challenges it as the problem.

The Geneva files show the other half of that arrangement: the international body that receives every page and declines to say what the pages prove.

The League preserved so much of the record that, a century later, we can reconstruct exactly how it failed.

An archive can preserve a failure perfectly. That is not success.

IHRA is not the League of Nations, and I am not arguing that it inherited anything. But it is standing where the League stood, holding a commitment, a warning, and a record.

IHRA cannot change the League’s archive.

It can decide not to enter it.