Closing the loophole? Drėlingas and Vasiliauskas cases from the crimes against humanity perspective
ENIt has already been stated multiple times that when we speak of the Drėlingas or Vasiliauskas cases, and when we are considering various issues of genocide in the circumstances of the crimes committed by the Soviet regime, another question looms over us. If proving genocide in those cases is so complicated, can we consider an alternative option: crimes against humanity? This question was exactly the one that came to my mind when I started to become interested in these cases. Crimes against humanity seemed like a natural choice, having in mind that they were already introduced in 1945 in the Statute of the International Military Tribunal, annexed to the London Charter, and their concept was afterwards confirmed by the UN General Assembly as well as post-World War II jurisprudence. For some reason, Lithuania did not use this category of crimes as an option for the prosecution of soviet criminals. Moreover, crimes against humanity in the Criminal Code of Independent Lithuania were introduced only in 2000, i.e., ten years into independence. This was always a puzzle to me, especially looking at our neighbours with a shared fate – Latvia and Estonia – who introduced definitions of these crimes in their legal systems much earlier. Keywords: Soviet Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, Political Genocide. [Extract, p. 33]
