Lithuania’s Regional Administrative Court has overturned a Migration Department decision in which officials refused asylum to a Georgian citizen, ordering him expelled from the country and banned from entering the Schengen area for three years.
The man is persecuted in Georgia for participating in Mikheil Saakashvili’s opposition party and for being LGBT. At home, law enforcement officers fabricated two criminal cases against him, searched his home, and threatened his family.
The man has been trying to obtain asylum in Lithuania since 2021. In that time, the Migration Department has refused him protection three times. Each time, the man appealed the decisions in court, which sided with him and required the migration authority to reconsider the application. And each time, the officials refused protection again.
In this third round of litigation, the man is being helped by an “Exiles” lawyer. In August, the lawyer managed to obtain a ban on the man’s expulsion to Georgia.
And now the Regional Administrative Court has fully overturned the Migration Department’s decision, obliging the officials to consider the asylum application for the fourth time.
The lawyer asked the court to examine the man’s request for protection itself, since the Migration Department consistently ignores court rulings. But, unfortunately, the court did not do so.
In the “Exiles” lawyer’s view, the grounds for granting protection are obvious and must finally be acknowledged by the Migration Department.
The man has been trying to get asylum for 5.5 years. 5.5 years!
However, the facts already established by the Migration Department, namely that the man is part of the LGBT community and took part in the opposition “United National Movement” party, do not convince the migration officials that he faces danger back home.
In their view, the law banning LGBT “propaganda” (“On Family Values and the Protection of Minors”), adopted in 2024, does not apply to the applicant. In doing so, the officials successfully ignore data from international human rights organizations, which point to the systemic discrimination, violence and threats against LGBT people in Georgia, as well as the impossibility of obtaining protection from law enforcement agencies.
Even though the leader of the “United National Movement” party, Mikheil Saakashvili, is in prison, and many opposition politicians and activists are being persecuted in Georgia, the Migration Department believes the man has nothing to fear from returning home.
As for the criminal cases, the migration officials did not consider them politically motivated. Moreover, they saw no risks to a gay man if he ended up in a prison “zone.” “These prisoners are required to wear white armbands so that they can be identified. They are held in separate premises to protect them from violence by other prisoners,” they explained their line of thinking.
In overturning the Migration Department’s third refusal decision, the court stressed that the officials must finally assess “the cumulative effect of the grounds for persecution — sexual orientation and political beliefs.”
I should note that the Court of Justice of the EU considered a similar case, on the complaint of the Russian citizen Torubarov. In it, the Court stated that repeated annulment of migration authority decisions without resolving the case on the merits violates the principle of legal certainty. In such cases, national courts must themselves decide the question of granting asylum.
It was this case law that we cited when we asked the court itself to grant the man protection. It is a pity that the CJEU’s approach was not applied. Nevertheless, we hope that this time the Migration Department will hear the arguments of the applicant and the court.
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