Lithuania has filed a lawsuit against Belarus at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, accusing Alexander Lukashenko’s regime of deliberately orchestrating a so-called hybrid “migration attack”, as reported by LRT.
In a diplomatic note submitted to the court on May 19, Vilnius claims that Minsk has systematically and knowingly violated the UN Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants, turning human flows into a tool of political pressure on Lithuania and the entire European Union.
According to Lithuania’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, since the summer of 2021, Belarusian state-owned companies sharply increased flights from Middle Eastern and African countries, issued visas under a simplified procedure, and housed passengers in Minsk. Afterwards, security forces allegedly transported groups of migrants to the Lithuanian border and forcibly pushed them across the state boundary.
“People were left in swampy terrain, without food or water, and under threat of violence,” the ministry noted.
Vilnius emphasizes that during this time, the Belarusian side ignored all Lithuanian border guards’ requests for joint patrols and information sharing.
In the lawsuit, Lithuania demands that Belarus be held responsible for violating international law, compensate for the costs of border protection—including building a border fence and deploying additional forces—and provide guarantees against the repetition of such actions. The total damages are estimated at several hundred million euros by the Ministry of the Interior and the State Border Guard Service.
According to Lithuanian border officials, since the beginning of the crisis, their units have prevented 23,600 people from crossing the border, many of whom made multiple attempts. Despite this, Minsk officially denies any organized role by the state, claiming the incidents are the “independent actions of refugees.”
This is already Vilnius's second move against Minsk in international jurisdictions: in 2023, Lithuania was the first to submit materials to the International Criminal Court, calling for an investigation into possible crimes against humanity committed by the Belarusian authorities. At the time, Lithuania pointed to “forced deportations of opposition members, mass persecutions, and inhumane treatment” in Belarus.
Amid the lawsuit, the Council of Europe confirmed plans to open an information office in Vilnius to support Belarusian civil society. Vilnius stresses that the lawsuit is not directed against the Belarusian people, but against a “regime that uses people as expendable tools in a political game.”
