The Law Behind the Fridman Trial
Artur Fridman did not enter an empty courtroom. Lithuania spent 15 years building the criminal-law boundary now applied to his Facebook post.
Artur Fridman is on trial in Vilnius over a Facebook post about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas and Lithuania’s postwar anti-Soviet partisans. Viewed alone, the prosecution can be made to sound routine: Lithuania has a criminal statute addressing denial or gross trivialization of specified international crimes, prosecutors say a citizen crossed the line, and a court will decide whether they can prove it. What that description leaves out is that the line itself has a history, and that the history is documented. I have published the full record, with the legislation, judgments and sources, in “Lithuania Built the Memory Crime.” What follows is its outline.
The sequence begins before the statute existed. In 2009, historian Mindaugas Pocius published research on the killing of civilians during Lithuania’s postwar partisan conflict. Historian Violeta Davoliūtė records that the reaction included a complaint asking prosecutors to investigate him for allegedly distorting Lithuanian history, and that the same year saw initiatives to criminalize slander of the Forest Brothers. She later wrote that the attacks produced a chilling effect on professional scholarship, and that Pocius’s book remained the only monograph addressing the subject.
Parliament supplied the instrument the following year. Law XI-901, enacted on June 15, 2010 and in force from June 29, added Article 170² to the Criminal Code and placed Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA in the Code’s annex of implemented European Union instruments. The European measure addresses racism and xenophobia, protecting groups defined by race, color, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin. It permitted member states to legislate more broadly; it did not require the additional category Lithuania created. That category — public approval, denial or gross trivialization of crimes committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against Lithuania or its inhabitants — was a national choice.
The controversy did not become criminal immediately. In 2017 it reached Dr. Darius Albertas Udrys, then director of Go Vilnius, who was born in the United States to a Lithuanian refugee family. His grandparents left Lithuania as the second Soviet occupation approached because they faced repression, and he moved to Lithuania because he had been raised to believe that, once the country was free, his generation should help rebuild it. His grandmother’s sister, together with two members of her family, was recognized by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations for sheltering a Jewish child during the German occupation.
Dr. Udrys questioned the morality of a partisan leaflet threatening death to people involved in organizing collective farms, while expressly rejecting Soviet crimes, collectivization and the human-rights abuses of the occupation. Conservative politicians demanded his removal. Mayor Remigijus Šimašius publicly criticized his position but said he would evaluate him on his work rather than his Facebook statements; five weeks later, on July 7, 2017, Šimašius removed him and cited inadequate performance. Dr. Udrys litigated. The Vilnius Regional Court found the municipality’s performance criticisms general and abstract, found no concrete evidence of professional fault, held that a court had to ensure he had not been dismissed on discriminatory grounds — including his contention that his public statements, beliefs and views were implicated — and found that the city’s public account of his supposed deficiencies had harmed his professional reputation. The Supreme Court expressly agreed that professional fault had not been established. His case was not criminal. It showed that by 2017 a question about the morality of partisan violence already carried institutional consequences.
Criminal process arrived the following year. Viačeslavas Titov, a Klaipėda municipal councilor, objected to commemorating Ramanauskas-Vanagas and made allegations about killings during the partisan conflict. In May 2019 the Klaipėda District Court convicted him under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2, and also on an Article 170 §2 incitement count that Fridman does not face.
The decisive development came in a case involving Algirdas Paleckis, who requires disclosure before he can be mentioned at all. He was already serving a prison sentence for preparing to spy for Russia’s Federal Security Service. He is not a sympathetic precedent and is not offered as one. What matters is what Lithuanian courts said about the statute in his case. In November 2024 the Kaunas District Court convicted him of defamation and acquitted him under Article 170² §1; in March 2025 the Kaunas Regional Court reversed in both directions, acquitting him of defamation and convicting him under Article 170² §1. On December 9, 2025 the Supreme Court upheld that conviction.
Its reasoning outlives the defendant who produced it. Within a single numbered paragraph, the Court recognized that historical discussion may contain polemic, sharpness and a degree of exaggeration, and that freedom of expression protects ideas that offend, shock or disturb — and then stated that international crimes may be denied or trivialized not only in direct language but through omissions, cautious formulations or hypotheses. By the end of 2025, Article 170² had acquired a method for examining not only what a speaker says but how a historical narrative is constructed.
Fridman’s speech was of a different kind. His May 9, 2024 post concealed nothing. He called the postwar partisans “forest bandits,” described Ramanauskas-Vanagas as a “pseudo-hero,” and alleged collaboration with Soviet security. He now faces Article 170² §1, which carries imprisonment of up to two years and requires the state to prove that the charged speech was threatening, abusive or insulting, or that public order was disturbed or capable of being disturbed, together with Article 313 §2, a criminal misdemeanor.
The prosecution file also contains a qualification that runs in both directions. A Lithuanian state institution recorded a Soviet security recruitment episode involving Ramanauskas in January 1945 under a codename rendered as Džūkija or Dzūkija; the same institution’s published account states that an adjoining notation records that he supplied no information and did not work for Soviet security. That does not prove Fridman’s stronger allegation of collaboration. It establishes that the dispute concerns an archive the state itself acknowledges, and that the archive has to be interpreted rather than dismissed by label.
None of this makes historical assertion immune from criminal law. In Perinçek v. Switzerland, the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights found a violation of Article 10 where criminal punishment had been imposed for historical-political speech, but the judgment turned on necessity and proportionality rather than establishing any general immunity. Lithuania’s Supreme Court engaged Article 10 in Paleckis and upheld his conviction, and that is the state’s strongest answer. It does not decide Fridman’s case, because necessity and proportionality are assessed on the speech, the charges and the record actually before the court, and his differ.
In April 2026, while Fridman was being prosecuted under the same provision, Consul General Sandra Brikaitė wrote to the Israeli-American Civic Action Network that Lithuania “fully upholds freedom of expression, including open and critical discussion of historical figures and events.” The record is the test of that sentence.
Artur Fridman is innocent. His trial remains pending, and the publicly available record does not presently establish every element of either charged offense or disclose a necessary and proportionate justification for using criminal law against his speech. Lithuania did not create Fridman’s words. It created the criminal-law architecture now being used to judge them.
The full documentary article, with the legislation, court decisions and source record, is here: Lithuania Built the Memory Crime. An archival PDF is available here.
