When a Member of the Seimas boasted that the Genocide Center defeated Grant Gochin in court, Lithuania’s rule-of-law defense collapsed.

On April 1, 2021, a Member of the Lithuanian Seimas said what Lithuania’s diplomats spend their careers denying.

What the diplomats deny is also what foreign investors, partners, and law firms doing business in Lithuania need to know before they sign anything. The legal environment a state advertises is not always the legal environment a state operates. Foreign companies underwrite contracts, joint ventures, and capital allocations on the representation that Lithuania has European judicial independence. The April 1, 2021 floor speech is the State telling its own parliament that the representation is not accurate.

During the parliamentary debate over the dismissal of Adas Jakubauskas as director of the state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Mindaugas Puidokas of the Labour Party faction rose at the Seimas tribune. He defended the institution. He defended Lithuania’s “heroes.” He named Kazys Škirpa, Jonas Noreika, and Juozas Brazaitis. Then he named Grant Gochin.

The official Seimas stenogram records the sentence in Lithuanian: “Genocido centras iki šiol niekada nepasidavė spaudimui: gindamas Lietuvos garbę jis net laimėjo teismus prieš etatinį Lietuvos juodintoją G. A. Gočiną.” The Genocide Center, Puidokas said, had never yielded to pressure: defending Lithuania’s honor, it had even won court cases against the “professional blackener of Lithuania, G. A. Gochin.” Etatinis juodintojas — staff blackener, paid blackener — identifies a Jewish American citizen of Lithuanian descent as a salaried agent professionally engaged in defaming the country he has spent a decade asking to acknowledge the murder of his own family. That sentence is not a slip. It is a confession.

Lithuania tells Europe, the United States, Israel, and the IHRA that it is governed by the rule of law. It says its courts are independent. It says its prosecutors act neutrally. It says its state historical institutions are scholarly bodies. It says criticism of its Holocaust memory regime is misunderstanding, exaggeration, or foreign manipulation.

Then, from the floor of the Seimas, one of its own legislators explained the system in plain language. The court victory was not described as neutral adjudication. It was not described as a finding of fact. It was described as the defense of Lithuania’s honor.

That is the Soviet system with European stationery. The court is not the referee. The court is the weapon. The historical institution is not the scholar. It is the custodian of national myth. The Jewish litigant is not a claimant. He is the enemy of national honor. The ruling is not law. It is state vindication.

This doctrine has a name. The Soviet term is “telefonnoye pravo”. The Lithuanian-language analogue is “telefoninė teisė”. In English, “telephone law”. Britannica records it directly: in cases of political importance, judicial decisions were dictated by telephone calls from party officials to judges. The post-Soviet variant does not require the call. The architecture does the work. The court understands the direction of acceptable outcomes. The institution understands the boundaries of permissible truth. The old vocabulary was “anti-Soviet.” The new vocabulary is “Kremlin narrative.” The function is the same. The Member of the Seimas at the tribune did not invent the language. He recited the system. I grew up inside it. I recognize it.

The........

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