The European Court of Human Rights on Soviet genocide in Lithuania: the 2019 case Drėlingas v. Lithuania

ENSince 1990 Lithuania has been the leader among the Baltic states in terms of claiming that what happened in Lithuania during the Soviet occupation (1940-1941 and 1944-1990) is genocide. The main reason for the perception of Soviet crimes in Lithuania as genocide is that the term "genocide" bears the power to precisely evaluate the huge losses of the Lithuanian nation and to address, at least, symbolic justice for the victims. In addition, the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Genocide Convention) is the foremost legal background for the evaluation of Soviet repressions, mainly because of its story telling function, which was the major purpose of the local trials undertaken by the Baltic states after 1990. The persistence of Lithuania was recently rewarded. In March of 2019, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in Strasbourg (France) promulgated a decision in the case of Drėlingas v. Lithuania which may have a role in ongoing efforts to combat attempts to whitewash history today. The European Court of Human Rights was established in 1959, as an extension of the European Convention on Human Rights (European Convention, 1950) in order to make real the postwar aim to prevent human rights violations in the future.