Today Lithuania’s Interior Minister Martynas Katelynas stated that he does not intend to put up with a situation in which the country cannot expel people who “pose a threat to its security.”
As an example, Katelynas cited Olga Karach, a human rights defender from Belarus who was sentenced there to 12 years on a number of political charges. According to the minister, Lithuania’s State Security Department (VSD) declared Karach a threat to national security, and the Supreme Administrative Court agreed with the VSD’s assessment.
“Why don’t we just expel her?” Katelynas asked indignantly. “Because international law and Lithuanian legislation prohibit returning a person to a state where they may face torture or inhuman or degrading treatment.”
The minister stressed that he “does not intend to put up with this,” and will pass information about Karach and the organization she heads, “Our Home,” to law enforcement agencies.
“The activities of other such persons, as well as their ties to hostile states and organizations associated with them, will also be assessed,” Katelynas added. According to him, the Migration Department will check whether these persons have the option of moving to a safe third country.
The minister also promised to examine whether legal instruments exist “to restrict the activities of such persons and their associated organizations.” And if they do not, to initiate the corresponding amendments to the laws.
An “Exiles” lawyer in Lithuania warns the minister against following the Russian path of dealing with undesirables, and urges that the “national security threat” mechanism no longer be used as a tool of political reprisal.
Olga Karach and the organization “Our Home” provide legal and humanitarian assistance to Belarusians and Ukrainians, and also write reports on the state of the rule of law in Lithuania for international institutions.
We think that one of these reports was the reason for the actions the Interior Minister announced. And the pretext was Olga being declared a “national security threat” for meeting with Tatyana Moskalkova, then Russia’s human rights commissioner. That meeting, moreover, took place long before the 2020 protests in Belarus.
As for the minister’s threats to initiate changes to the laws, I agree: they are indeed long overdue. A systemic problem needs to be resolved, one that we at “Exiles” have been talking about for more than a month, and which threatens serious reputational damage to Lithuania itself.
The blood-curdling phrase “threat to national security,” after which you expect accusations of espionage or involvement in extremist organizations, in reality looks like this.
When an applicant fills out a form for a Lithuanian visa or residence permit, they must state their previous employment in Russia or Belarus. And if it turns out that their former employer is the state or a state-owned company (roughly 50% of Belarus’s economy), that worker is deemed a threat. Even if the person worked as a lathe operator, a welder, or a secretary.
Lithuania’s national security concept is built in such a way that what taints you is not a genuinely bad act of your own, but your previous job and the assumption that, because of it, you might be recruited in the future by the intelligence services of your home country.
This is not absurdity. This is Lithuanian reality. And recently Lithuania’s State Security Department itself confirmed this practice to journalists.
To help you gauge the scale of this practice, here are the Lithuanian Migration Department’s statistics for Belarusian citizens alone. In 2025, 1,634 Belarusians were declared a threat to national security and stripped of their residence permits.
Mr. Katelynas does not understand why international norms and Lithuania’s laws do not allow refugees to be expelled to countries where they face danger. The very way the question is posed would seem to contain the answer. But the minister is a chemist by training, not a lawyer. So the details of international law may be unknown to him. But we are lawyers, and it is no trouble for us to explain them.
The principle of non-refoulement is a fundamental norm of international law that prohibits states from expelling, returning or extraditing a person to a country where they face torture, ill-treatment, persecution or a real danger to their life. Unfortunately, in practice Lithuania systematically and with impunity violates this principle.
To bring the de jure into line with the de facto, Mr. Katelynas will first have to initiate the denunciation of a whole series of international treaties: the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, the 1984 Convention against Torture, and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (it is impossible to withdraw from it, although North Korea tried unsuccessfully). Naturally, the European Convention on Human Rights will also have to be denounced (let us recall that Russia left it earlier, and a bit before that, during the era of the “Black Colonels,” Greece left it).
At the same time, amendments will need to be made to a vast body of national legislation.
And to finally entrench a mechanism for the arbitrary expulsion of foreigners, we recommend adopting a law on undesirable organizations. And, along with it, a law on foreign agents, in order to “lawfully” force Lithuanian citizens to leave the country. There will be no need to draft the laws from scratch: translating the models from Russian into Lithuanian with a neural network will take no more than half an hour.
But there is another path. One that we, now without any jokes, propose that the Lithuanian Interior Minister and other senior officials consider.
Stop branding everyone indiscriminately with the label “threat to national security.” Stop using this mechanism as a tool of political reprisal. And start talking to the Russian and Belarusian diasporas. We are not enemies and we are not spies.
I repeat: the Baltic states are at a fork in the road. They can follow the path of mutilating national law in the best Russian traditions, or they can start a dialogue and solve problems in line with European values.
We at “Exiles” are open to dialogue.
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