Lithuania has never punished a Lithuanian for the murder of Jews. It threatens a Jewish citizen with prison for speech.

On March 27, 2006, the Vilnius Regional Court found that Algimantas Mykolas Dailidė had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians. The Prosecutor General’s Office requested five years in prison. The offense carried imprisonment from five to twenty years, or life. The court released him from criminal responsibility under Article 36.

The prosecution appealed. In 2008, the Lithuanian Court of Appeal upheld both the finding and the refusal to punish.

On October 30, 2025, the Vilnius Regional Prosecutor’s Office signed a 220-page indictment against Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, over a Facebook post written after visiting his grandfather’s grave. Article 170² §1 carries up to two years’ imprisonment.

A country’s real criminal law is not the text of its code but the punishment its institutions choose to impose, and Lithuania’s institutions have made that choice twice on the same subject. Confronted with an adjudicated Lithuanian perpetrator of the persecution of Jews, they produced exemption. Confronted with a Jew who challenged Lithuania’s heroization of a state-recognized partisan, they produced a prosecution. Fridman is innocent, and the case against him is illegitimate. What follows measures the second file against the first.

What the courts found Dailidė did

Dailidė did not stand near the machinery that killed Lithuania’s Jews; he operated it. From 1941 to 1944 he served in the Vilnius district branch of the Lithuanian Security Police, the Saugumas. American courts found specific acts of persecution: he took part in arrests of Jews who had escaped the Vilnius ghetto, after which they passed into Saugumas custody and were handed to Nazi security forces. A federal court in Cleveland revoked his citizenship on January 29, 1997, after establishing that he had entered the United States in 1950 by telling immigration officials he had been a forester during the war. He left for Germany before a removal order could be executed, and the Eleventh Circuit later upheld the order. The United States established his removability. Lithuania imposed nothing.

The American immigration court recorded where that transfer led. The court found that the Jews Dailidė arrested were either shot at the execution pits at Paneriai, where its record estimated that approximately fifty thousand Jews were murdered, or returned to the Vilnius ghetto for confinement under conditions it described as “inhumane and grotesque.” Nearly all were ultimately killed. “Persecution” is the legal word; the pits at Paneriai are what the word names.

Lithuania’s own findings were separate and unambiguous. Its courts found that Dailidė arrested Jews, searched their homes, detained them, and seized two who had escaped the ghetto. The Court of Appeal confirmed that he had intentionally and systematically persecuted Jewish civilians. Two judicial systems, working from the same archive, reached the same finding.

Having proved the crime, Lithuania declined the sentence. The offense of treatment of persons prohibited under international law, under Article 100 of the Criminal Code, carried a five-year minimum and permitted life imprisonment. Prosecutors requested five years, the statutory minimum, saying that Dailidė’s age and illnesses justified seeking no more. His defense requested acquittal. The court rejected acquittal, found the offense proved, and then terminated the case under Article 36 of the Criminal Code without imposing a sentence. Article 36 permits release when changed circumstances have left the person, or the act, no longer dangerous.

Lithuania did not deny what Dailidė had done; the crime remained proved. It declared instead........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)