Artur Fridman did not enter an empty courtroom. Lithuania spent 15 years building the criminal-law boundary now applied to his Facebook post.

Artur Fridman is on trial in Vilnius over a Facebook post about Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas and Lithuania’s postwar anti-Soviet partisans. Viewed alone, the prosecution can be made to sound routine: Lithuania has a criminal statute addressing denial or gross trivialization of specified international crimes, prosecutors say a citizen crossed the line, and a court will decide whether they can prove it. What that description leaves out is that the line itself has a history, and that the history is documented. I have published the full record, with the legislation, judgments and sources, in “Lithuania Built the Memory Crime.” What follows is its outline.

The sequence begins before the statute existed. In 2009, historian Mindaugas Pocius published research on the killing of civilians during Lithuania’s postwar partisan conflict. Historian Violeta Davoliūtė records that the reaction included a complaint asking prosecutors to investigate him for allegedly distorting Lithuanian history, and that the same year saw initiatives to criminalize slander of the Forest Brothers. She later wrote that the attacks produced a chilling effect on professional scholarship, and that Pocius’s book remained the only monograph addressing the subject.

Parliament supplied the instrument the following year. Law XI-901, enacted on June 15, 2010 and in force from June 29, added Article 170² to the Criminal Code and placed Council Framework Decision 2008/913/JHA in the Code’s annex of implemented European Union instruments. The European measure addresses racism and xenophobia, protecting groups defined by race, color, religion, descent, or national or ethnic origin. It permitted member states to legislate more broadly; it did not require the additional category Lithuania created. That category — public approval, denial or gross trivialization of crimes committed by the USSR or Nazi Germany against Lithuania or its........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)