Who Judges Lithuania’s 157 Measures?

Lithuania’s action plan contains useful projects and measurable commitments. It still lacks an institution capable of deciding that the state itself failed.

Lithuania adopted its national action plan on 21 January 2026 under the twentieth government led by Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė. The government published a nineteen-page framework and a thirty-one-page implementation appendix. On 14 July, the twenty-first government led by Mindaugas Sinkevičius was sworn in. The plan crossed that transition without acquiring an independent evaluator. It was adopted by one government, inherited by another, and still leaves the state to judge its own performance.

I have published the complete source audit, with the measure-by-measure record, institutional links, transparency chronology, and questions for the public record. A stable linked PDF is also available for readers who want the full document in one file.

The full investigation also explains a refinement to my 9 May article, AJC and Lithuania: I had focused too narrowly on the plan’s main text. The implementation appendix names the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, LGGRTC, repeatedly. The issue is not omission. It is the decision to place LGGRTC inside the implementation machinery without first requiring an independent review of its disputed record.

The plan is not empty. It includes security assessments for Jewish institutions, law-enforcement training, teacher education, museum work, cemetery and massacre-site preservation, public-attitude targets, annual reporting, victim-name projects, and proposed legislation concerning public honors and memorials. Some of that work deserves support.

The central defect is structural. Lithuania appoints the coordinator. State institutions implement the measures. Those institutions report their progress to a government-appointed coordinator, who then publishes the government’s account. The plan creates an internal reporting loop. It does not create an independent body with the authority, access, and protected standing needed to conclude that a state institution failed.

That matters because LGGRTC is given several operational roles. It participates in decisions concerning public objects, the identification and marking of rescuers’ sites, proposed legislation on the withdrawal of honors, victim-name memorial projects, and the review of Holocaust exhibitions in municipal museums.

LGGRTC’s historical record is not uncontested. In 2019, AJC publicly criticized its defense of Jonas Noreika and cited Lithuania’s own historical commission describing the Centre’s arguments as minimization and obfuscation. Silvia Foti, Noreika’s granddaughter, has separately documented the evidentiary problem in When Rescuer Becomes a Distortion, The Signature That Still Haunts Lithuania, and What Lithuania Did With the Signature. The action plan does not first require an independent audit of LGGRTC’s disputed work. It assigns LGGRTC new responsibilities inside the corrective machinery.

The problem is therefore not that Lithuania forgot the Centre. The problem is that an institution requiring examination helps administer the proposed cure.

Measure 3.4 illustrates the distinction between activity and correction. It promises draft legislation by the first quarter of 2027 to improve procedures for removing certain public objects and withdrawing legal status or state awards where confirmed facts establish collaboration with repressive structures or participation in civilian killings. That is potentially useful. It is still a future legislative promise.

The measure removes no named honor now. It identifies no independent tribunal. It does not explain who will decide when facts are sufficiently “confirmed,” how conflicting historical evidence will be assessed, or how the mechanism will apply to existing cases. A future draft law can become important. It can also become another completed administrative entry while the protected historical record remains unchanged.

Artur Fridman’s prosecution supplies a present test. Lithuania’s government confirmed in April 2026 that his case was before the Vilnius City District Court. The prosecution concerns his historical speech about the state-honored Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas and invokes Lithuania’s historical-speech provision. I located no publicly accessible later disposition in the sources reviewed through 4 August. The documentary chronology is set out in The Prosecution of Artur Fridman.

The action plan does not decide Fridman’s guilt or innocence. It can nevertheless be judged against the existence of his case. A strategy that catalogs speech, education, commemoration, and cooperation while omitting a live prosecution of a Jewish citizen over historical speech has left government power outside its own accountability architecture.

The public presentation of Jewish institutional access raises a related question. On 4 August, the Lithuanian government published a photograph of Prime Minister Mindaugas Sinkevičius meeting Faina Kukliansky and Andrew Baker as co-chairs of the Good Will Foundation. The photograph establishes attendance. It does not, by itself, establish agreement or endorsement.

Nothing here is intended as criticism of Faina Kukliansky, and no position is attributed to her. She appears in this account only because the government identified and pictured her.

Baker’s public capacity at that meeting was specific. He had retired from AJC on 1 July and was identified by the government as a Good Will Foundation co-chair. His continuing Foundation, Claims Conference, and OSCE roles are distinct. No agreement is known to have resulted from the meeting.

If the meeting is later invoked as evidence of broader Jewish consent, the public should be shown which entity is said to have agreed, the office in which any representative acted, the authority relied upon, the subject matter and limits of that authority, and any approval required. A title does not automatically create a mandate from every Litvak descendant. A meeting with one institutional representative does not silently aggregate AJC, WJRO, the Claims Conference, the Lithuanian Jewish Community, diaspora descendants, and Litvaks generally.

AJC’s own position should also be described accurately. It did not simply applaud the plan. Its public statement welcomed the adoption of a national strategy while saying the plan proposed “virtually no new initiatives.” AJC had also criticized LGGRTC before. Those facts belong in any fair account.

The remaining question is due diligence. Between 19 and 29 April 2026, I sent six discrete written requests for action, access, institutional positions, or public reporting concerning the planned AJC presentation and the Lithuanian plan. The broader documentary count is eight contacts when two formal notice and transmission events are included. Baker forwarded AJC’s public statement, so it would be inaccurate to claim that no response of any kind was made. In the correspondence reviewed, however, I did not locate a complete itemized answer to the enumerated questions, a disclosed measure-by-measure due-diligence file, or a published account of what Lithuania was asked and what it answered.

The full article publishes the chronology and the questions. It does not allege corruption, financial misconduct, conspiracy, or personal bad faith. It asks institutions that claim public standing to show the record supporting their public position.

Lithuania’s own history makes the omission more striking. In 1919, while seeking international recognition, Lithuania made an expansive eight-point undertaking concerning Jewish civic, political, national, linguistic, religious, communal, and financial rights. Before admission to the League of Nations, it again accepted minority-protection obligations. Lithuanian representatives later certified the state’s success. Jewish representatives documented the narrowing of the promises. The international machinery received the record without producing an effective judgment against the state.

The political systems of 1919, interwar authoritarianism, Nazi occupation, Soviet rule, and restored independence are not identical, and I do not collapse them. The recurring institutional sequence is narrower: promise, self-certification, Jewish documentation, and a process capable of receiving evidence without independently deciding that the state failed.

Lithuania’s 2026 plan can still produce worthwhile work. It should be strengthened by an independent evaluator, a public measure-level dashboard, a named review of contested honors and state historical claims, an audit of historical-speech enforcement, and published disclosure of the mandates and due diligence of institutions presented as Jewish interlocutors.

One hundred and fifty-seven measures can document activity. They cannot substitute for judgment.

The complete investigation is available on Substack. The linked publication PDF preserves the article, appendices, source network, transparency chronology, and questions for the public record.

Show the record. Show the mandate. Show the institution that can say Lithuania failed.