The Court That Already Disqualified the Witness
Lithuania used procedure to shield LGGRTC from review. It cannot now use the same institution as certified proof against Artur Fridman.
In 2020, Lithuania’s Supreme Administrative Court gave the Lithuanian state the ruling it needed. The historical outputs of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania — LGGRTC — were treated as outside the kind of administrative merits review that would force the state to test its Holocaust-memory claims in court. That ruling helped shield LGGRTC when Grant Gochin sought judicial review of its conduct concerning Jonas Noreika.
Four years later, the same state built a criminal prosecution against Artur Fridman on the same memory regime.
The ruling has returned. It now points in the opposite direction.
I am not a lawyer. I do not write as counsel for Fridman, and I do not speak for his defense. I write as a documentary filmmaker who has spent five years recording the Baltic Holocaust, and as a former Soviet citizen who recognizes how state truth systems work. This is a public-record argument about consistency. Lithuania cannot classify LGGRTC’s outputs as non-reviewable when Jews challenge them, then treat those same outputs as state-certified historical truth when a Jew is prosecuted.
That is not law.
That is directionality.
The ruling Lithuania wanted
The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania describes itself as a state entity. Its own English-language description says it studies genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, occupation, resistance, and commemorates victims and fighters. It also states that the Centre’s director general is proposed by the prime minister, appointed and dismissed by the Seimas, and that LGGRTC reports to the Seimas and to the national government.
This is not a private historical society.
It is a state memory institution.
When Gochin challenged LGGRTC’s historical treatment of Noreika, the courts did not place the underlying Holocaust record on trial. They did not adjudicate whether LGGRTC’s exculpatory historical conclusions were true. They did not test the evidence concerning Noreika’s orders, ghettoization, expropriation, or the institutional defense of his memory. They disposed of the claims through procedure.
The critical administrative track is preserved in the public Lithuania litigation inventory. The Vilnius County Administrative Court dismissed Case No. eI-534-281/2019 on March 27, 2019. On April 1, 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court terminated Case No. eA-1768-624/2020 and ordered Gochin to pay 950 euros in appellate legal expenses. The ruling was final and not subject to appeal. Additional tracks followed: Case No. eI2-2846-535/2020, Case No. eAS-312-552/2020, the civil track in Case No. e2-21120-936/2020, the appeal in Case No. e2S-1149-560/2020, and the August 18, 2020 cassation refusal.
The pattern is summarized in Gochin’s Procedural Dismissal Catalogue. It is simple. When the Jewish complainant sought merits review of state Holocaust-memory outputs, Lithuania converted substance into procedure. The state did not prove LGGRTC correct. It avoided the need to decide whether LGGRTC was correct.
That matters now.
The reciprocal force
A ruling that protects the state can also bind the state.
If LGGRTC’s outputs are not reviewable administrative determinations, then Lithuania cannot easily present those same outputs as binding administrative truth in a criminal prosecution. If they are merely informational or scholarly outputs, then they must enter a criminal proceeding as what they are: opinion material subject to full adversarial examination. If they are state acts, then the people affected by them must be able to challenge them as state acts.
Lithuania cannot have the third position it appears to want: non-reviewable when challenged, authoritative when enforced.
That is the contradiction.
It is not a technicality. It is the center of the Fridman case.
Artur Fridman is a Lithuanian Jewish citizen. On May 9, 2024, he visited Antakalnis Cemetery in Vilnius to honor his grandfather Aron Fridman, a Jewish soldier who fought Nazi Germany in the Red Army. He posted on Facebook. He praised those who fought fascism and questioned Lithuania’s heroization of Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas. Lithuania answered with Criminal Case No. 02-2-00512-24, including charges under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2.
Gochin’s The Selective Enforcement Index describes the prosecution as a 220-page indictment arising from one social-media post. His later public-record article, The State’s Witness Is the State’s Lie, introduced the issue as public notice to the Government and Courts of Lithuania in Case No. 02-2-00512-24, identifying LGGRTC as the apparent evidentiary spine of the state’s historical case.
My four-part Times of Israel series, The Witness That Cannot Survive Cross-Examination, Part I, examined LGGRTC as a proposed state witness. Part II examined its own documents. Part III addressed the legal architecture. Part IV placed the record in public view before Lithuania can make the problem disappear.
This article narrows the issue further.
Before the Fridman court reaches ideology, memory, partisans, Soviet crimes, or Facebook language, it must answer a prior question: what is LGGRTC in this case?
Is it a fact witness? No. LGGRTC did not witness Fridman’s post, Vanagas’s conduct, or the historical events at issue.
Is it an expert witness? Then it must be treated like one. Its methods, sources, omissions, institutional conflicts, prior falsehoods, and due-diligence file must be subject to full examination.
Is it a state certifier of historical truth? Then Lithuania has a problem. Its own courts treated LGGRTC outputs as outside the administrative-law merits review that would have allowed those outputs to be tested when a Jewish complainant challenged them.
No court should permit a state to avoid review in civil posture and then demand deference in criminal posture.
The due-diligence file
The practical consequence is direct.
If LGGRTC appears in the Fridman prosecution as historical authority, the court should require production of the complete due-diligence file behind the material on which the prosecution relies. Not a summary. Not a polished institutional letter. Not the final historical certificate alone.
The file.
The sources consulted. The sources omitted. Internal correspondence. Research instructions. Drafts. Reviewer comments. Translations. The basis for any conclusion about Ramanauskas-Vanagas. The basis for any conclusion about the meaning of Fridman’s words. Any prior LGGRTC correspondence contradicting the position now advanced. Any record showing whether LGGRTC considered the criticisms already placed in the public record.
If LGGRTC has no such due-diligence file, that is evidence.
If it has one and refuses production, that is evidence.
If the court accepts LGGRTC without requiring the file, that is evidence.
The issue is not whether a defendant may insult a national hero. The issue is whether a state may criminalize historical speech by importing a protected state-memory institution into court while shielding that same institution from the examination that its role requires.
Article 6
The European Convention on Human Rights is binding on Lithuania. Article 6 protects the right to a fair trial. In criminal proceedings, that right includes the ability to examine witnesses and challenge the evidence used by the state.
If LGGRTC is used as a witness, Fridman must be able to confront it. If LGGRTC is used as expert authority, Fridman must be able to test it. If LGGRTC is used as state-certified proof, Fridman must be able to challenge the legal basis on which a non-reviewable institutional output became criminal evidence.
The state cannot answer this by ceremony. It cannot answer by invoking anti-Soviet resistance. It cannot answer by pointing to flags, funerals, uniforms, or commemorations. Criminal procedure is not a memorial service.
The accused is entitled to test the evidence.
That is the point Lithuania’s own 2020 court architecture has now made unavoidable.
The state’s trap
In Soviet systems, official truth worked because it did not need to be proved. It needed only to be repeated by the correct institution. The archive was invoked. The committee certified. The ministry transmitted. The court accepted. The citizen was expected to stand beneath the conclusion.
That is not how a democratic criminal trial is supposed to work.
A democratic court cannot convict a citizen on the basis of state memory that becomes unreviewable when challenged and authoritative when enforced. That would not be the rule of law. It would be the Soviet method with European stationery.
Lithuania built the trap itself.
When Jews challenged LGGRTC, Lithuania said procedure prevented review. When Fridman challenged state memory, Lithuania turned the same memory system into criminal process. The contradiction is now visible.
The 2020 Supreme Administrative Court ruling did not certify LGGRTC as truthful. It protected LGGRTC from being tested. That distinction is decisive.
A shield is not a credential.
A closed courtroom door is not a certificate of historical accuracy.
A procedural dismissal is not a finding that the state told the truth.
The choice before Lithuania
The Fridman court now has a clean choice.
It can treat LGGRTC as an expert and permit full examination, including production of the due-diligence file and cross-examination on the institution’s credibility record.
It can treat LGGRTC as a non-reviewable research body and refuse to let the state use it as certified criminal proof.
Or it can apply Lithuania’s legal architecture one way against Jews and another way for the state.
That third choice will not remain local. It will travel. It will travel to Strasbourg, to scholars of Holocaust distortion, to journalists, to foreign ministries, to Jewish institutions, and to every forum where Lithuania markets itself as a European democracy committed to historical truth.
The court that already disqualified the witness did not do so in Fridman’s case. It did so earlier, when Lithuania wanted to protect LGGRTC from review.
Now consistency requires the same ruling to operate in the other direction.
Lithuania cannot use LGGRTC as both untouchable shield and prosecutorial sword.
The state must choose.
