Lithuania used procedure to shield LGGRTC from review. It cannot now use the same institution as certified proof against Artur Fridman.

In 2020, Lithuania’s Supreme Administrative Court gave the Lithuanian state the ruling it needed. The historical outputs of the Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania — LGGRTC — were treated as outside the kind of administrative merits review that would force the state to test its Holocaust-memory claims in court. That ruling helped shield LGGRTC when Grant Gochin sought judicial review of its conduct concerning Jonas Noreika.

Four years later, the same state built a criminal prosecution against Artur Fridman on the same memory regime.

The ruling has returned. It now points in the opposite direction.

I am not a lawyer. I do not write as counsel for Fridman, and I do not speak for his defense. I write as a documentary filmmaker who has spent five years recording the Baltic Holocaust, and as a former Soviet citizen who recognizes how state truth systems work. This is a public-record argument about consistency. Lithuania cannot classify LGGRTC’s outputs as non-reviewable when Jews challenge them, then treat those same outputs as state-certified historical truth when a Jew is prosecuted.

That is directionality.

The ruling Lithuania wanted

The Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania describes itself as a state entity. Its own English-language description says it studies genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, occupation, resistance, and commemorates victims and fighters. It also states that the Centre’s director general is proposed by the prime minister, appointed and dismissed by the Seimas, and that LGGRTC reports to the Seimas and to the national government.

This is not a private historical society.

It is a state memory institution.

When Gochin challenged LGGRTC’s historical treatment of Noreika, the courts did not place the underlying Holocaust record on trial. They did not adjudicate whether LGGRTC’s exculpatory historical conclusions were true. They did not test the evidence concerning Noreika’s orders, ghettoization, expropriation, or the institutional defense of his memory. They disposed of the claims through procedure.

The critical administrative track is preserved in the public Lithuania litigation inventory. The Vilnius County Administrative Court dismissed Case No. eI-534-281/2019 on March 27, 2019. On April 1, 2020, the Supreme Administrative Court terminated Case No. eA-1768-624/2020 and ordered Gochin to pay 950 euros in appellate legal expenses. The ruling was........

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