Vasiliauskas, Drėlingas and beyond - an insider's view
ENThe judgment of the European Court of Human Rights Chamber in Drėlingas v. Lithuania (2019) is usually seen as the antithesis of Vasiliauskas v. Lithuania (2015). In Vasiliauskas, which involved an applicant convicted for the (Soviet) genocide of Lithuanian partisans in the post-war years, the Court found a violation of Article 7 of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, whereas in the very similar Drėlingas case such a violation was not established. This article, authored by a judge of the Court who sat in both of these cases, deals with a peculiar set of circumstances pertaining to the procedure of the examination of Drėlingas. Not yet paid heed by any commentator (and hardly noticeable to an outsider), these circumstances, and especially their sequence, allow hypothetical questions to be raised as to what the outcome of Drėlingas could have been if the sequence of events dealt with had been different, let alone if some of the events had not taken place. Keywords: European Court of Human Rights, Lithuania, genocide, Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe. [From the publication]
