Vasiliauskas v. Lithuania (Eur. Ct. H.R.)

ENIntroduction On October 20, 2015, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) issued its judgment in Vasiliauskas v. Lithuania. This case adds to the increasing jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights that overlaps with and/or adds to the law on international crimes, an area of law that has been the subject of significant academic interest. As with many of the cases on point, the judgment relates to the prosecutions of historical offenses, but with a twist. Background. In this case, decided before the Court’s Grand Chamber, there was a challenge to the convictions (and their related civil aspects) entered, after a number of domestic appeals, in 2005, of two members of a group of Soviet government actors in Lithuania. More specifically, the applicants had been convicted of genocide for killing two members of Lithuanian pro-independence groups in 1953. The applicants challenged this on the basis of Article 7 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which provides that: 1. No one shall be held guilty of any criminal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a criminal offence under national or international law at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the criminal offence was committed. 2. This Article shall not prejudice the trial and punishment of any person for any act or omission which, at the time when it was committed, was criminal according to the general principles of law recognised by civilised nations.The applicants’ claim was based on the fact that until the early 1990s, neither Lithuanian law, the law of the USSR, nor international law more generally included political groups as protected groups under the law of genocide, and so they alleged that their conviction was retrospective. As such, the judgment of the Grand Chamber deals with important issues of the ambit of genocide (whether it deals with political groups) and the extent to which political groups can overlap with national groups (and the extent to which this further interacts with the concept of destruction in whole or, importantly, in part). It also covers, to some extent, the nature of the relationship between international crimes and their domestic counterparts. It does so mostly, and given the nature of the claim, rightly, through the lens of retrospectivity. [p. 501].