Titulinis

We are delighted that the Research Council of Lithuania, under its funding measure “Researcher Groups Projects”, has granted financial support to the project implemented by the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences – “Hope of release: The Implementation and Impact of Life Imprisonment in Lithuania” (IMPACT). The project will be carried out by the Law Institute research team during the period from 12 November 2025 to 28 April 2028.

In 2019, amendments to legislation were adopted in Lithuania granting persons serving life imprisonment the right to apply for the commutation of this sentence to a fixed-term custodial sentence of between five and ten years, provided that they have already served at least 20 years of their sentence and meet other requirements established by the court. Nevertheless, the two-tier life sentence commutation procedure implemented by the Lithuanian legislator has raised significant concerns regarding its adherence to the European Court’s (ECtHR) criteria in practice, and its capacity to provide institutional (as opposed to transformative) hope for individuals serving life sentences.

During the implementation of the IMPACT project, a multi-method and interdisciplinary approach will be applied to critically examine the evolution of Lithuania’s ultimate penalty since the abolition of the death penalty through to the ECtHR’s decision, and assess its current implementation from the perspective of frontline practitioners. In addition, the project will explore the lived experiences of life imprisonment through interviews with persons sentenced to life imprisonment and prison staff. By going beyond prison walls and seeking to understand the everyday realities of both practitioners and convicted persons, the IMPACT project team will also aim to determine the extent to which the new commutation procedure offers a realistic hope of release.

The research team of the project consists of: Dr Catherine Appleton (Project leader), Prof. Dr Artūras Tereškinas, Assoc. Prof. Dr Simonas Nikartas, PhD student Goda Dainauskaitė, and Ieva Ruzgytė.

The project is funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), Contract No. S-MIP-25-78.

More information about the project here.

At the beginning of 2026, Salomėja Zaksaitė, Senior Research Fellow at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, together with Benas Lastauskas, published an article in the international journal Journal of “Cultural Analysis and Social Change” entitled “Organisational Model of the Nuremberg Trials: Between Law, History and Criminology”.

Although the Nuremberg Trials are widely praised for establishing the principle of individual criminal responsibility for international crimes, the article also discusses their potential negative consequences, including the risk of victors’ justice, the selective enforcement of international law, and the “whitewashing” of the true culprits of the Second World War. The trials were conducted by the victorious Allied powers, which raised concerns about the influence of power and political interests on the judicial process. These courts may have been used to justify the actions of the victors and to consolidate their post-war dominance.

In the publication, the authors conclude that the organisation of the Nuremberg Trials was primarily a political rather than a legal project, in which law was chosen as a means to achieve political ends. The very fact that political agreements excluded the legality of the victorious states’ wartime actions from evaluation during the proceedings demonstrates a departure from one of the fundamental principles of the Western legal tradition — that politics should be subordinate to law (and not the other way around). The article notes that such a critique of the Nuremberg Trials, grounded in the spirit of critical criminology, may be “reversed” and applied to (international) criminal law as a whole.

The article is available in English here.

On 16 January 2026, the National Martynas Mažvydas Library hosted the presentation of the book “The January 13th Case and Events: Between Law, Criminology, and History”, written by researchers of the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Science Dr Salomėja Zaksaitė, Dr Sigita Černevičiūtė, and Dr Monika Rogers.

At the event, the authors first spoke about their personal relationship with the events and the January 13th case—what inspired them to take up this topic—while at the same time emphasizing that, despite personal biographical details and the fact that the events analysed have become almost sacred in the nation’s collective consciousness, the research material was approached without pathos and strictly from a scholarly perspective. As the scholarly study is interdisciplinary, Dr Zaksaitė noted that one of the main challenges was reconciling the concepts and methodological approaches of history, political science, criminology, and law. Dr Rogers observed that the book is unique in that the events and the case are examined through three analytical lenses: public discourse, the perpetrator, and the experience of the victim. According to Professor Dr Nerijus Šepetys of Vilnius University, who participated in the discussion, the use of the victim and public discourse perspectives helped to better understand and rethink how the case unfolded and what crime was committed. Associate Professor Dr Dalia Bukelevičiūtė of Vilnius University also emphasized the value of the book as an interdisciplinary study. Typically, historical and legal assessments of events exist separately and often do not coincide, whereas this study seeks to find a compromise between these two forms of evaluation.

The book also seeks to answer the question of how justice was pursued after the events. A significant part of the scholarly study is devoted to the analysis of victims’ experiences. Dr Rogers, who collected and analysed these accounts, noted that victims and witnesses of the events acknowledged that the very fact that judicial proceedings took place and verdicts were delivered helped them feel that justice had been achieved. In their perception, Mikhail Gorbachev remains the only symbolic figure who was left unpunished. Interestingly, according to Dr Zaksaitė, the question of Gorbachev’s responsibility served as a kind of connecting link between the victims and the accused. The latter felt abandoned and betrayed by him. Why was Mikhail Gorbachev never even questioned? This and many other unanswered questions, as well as the 700 volumes of the case that may one day become accessible to the public, were seen by the event participants as an incentive to continue analysing these historical events from various disciplinary perspectives for decades to come.

The scholarly study is available here (in Lithuanian).

The project “The January 13th Case and Events: A Legal, Criminological, and Historical Research” (SAUSIO13) and the publication of the scholarly study based on it were funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (RCL) under the State Programme for Lithuanian Studies and Dissemination 2016–2024, Contract No. S-LIP-20-71.

At the end of 2025, the international journal International Review of Intellectual Property and Competition Law (IIC) published an article by Dr Rita Matulionytė, Senior Researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, entitled “Reconceptualising the Reproduction Right in the Age of AI”.

Dr Matulionytė, who has been researching intellectual property law for many years, explains that the impetus for writing this article came from the growing outrage within creative communities caused by the training of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms on millions of creative works without authorisation from their creators.

The reproduction right is implicated at various stages of the AI development process, for example during the creation of training datasets, where at least transient technological copies are produced. However, experts fundamentally disagree on whether a trained AI model itself contains copies of the training data or their legal equivalents. The article argues that, although AI models may not create digital copies of training data as traditionally understood, the “ingestion” of works during the training process is functionally equivalent to the storage of those works within the model. Consequently, such data should fall within the scope of the reproduction right.

Dr Matulionytė concludes that the time has come to update the reproduction right by incorporating a new form of use of works, namely the “ingestion” of works into AI models during the AI training process. As such an expansion of the concept of the reproduction right would also affect the interests of other stakeholders—particularly the AI industry—it may be necessary to consider appropriate exceptions and limitations in order to ensure a fair balance between competing private and public interests.

The article is available in English here.

On December 10, Dr Skirmantas Bikelis, a researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Research Centre for Social Sciences (LCSS), participated in the discussion “What Is the Future of the International Human Rights Order?” at the 8th National Human Rights Forum (NHRF), held at the Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania. It took place shortly after the announcement of the U.S. National Security Strategy, but before the attack on Venezuela. However, the question raised by the session remains relevant and is becoming ever more so. During the discussion, the focus was primarily on the disregard for international law in Ukraine and in Palestine, particularly in Gaza.

S. Bikelis expressed the view that the standards established by the Supreme Court of Lithuania (SCL) for the crime of genocide (in the Vasiliauskas and Drėlingas cases, where the defendants were found guilty of participation in the genocide of Lithuanian partisans) are very liberal – considerably more permissive than those applied by international criminal tribunals. Therefore, if individuals responsible for crimes in Gaza were to be tried in Lithuania, proving the body of genocide as it is understood in Lithuania would be relatively easy (bearing in mind the concept of the crime, rather than the practical circumstances and difficulties of gathering evidence). Moreover, the differences in scale between the total destruction of Gaza and the killings of partisans are quite evident. Evidence of genocidal intent is also abundant and is described in detail in the findings of the United Nations Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory (including East Jerusalem), and Israel. By contrast, the existence of genocidal intent in the killings of Lithuanian partisans (as a group vital to the nation’s survival) is even more debatable.

In the context of Lithuania’s position, it is also important that on the eve of the Forum, in its ruling in the Paleckis case concerning the denial of genocide, the Supreme Court of Lithuania stated that “international crimes may be denied or trivialized not only through the use of explicit language, but also, inter alia, by means of omissions, by taking cover behind cautious wording or hypotheses that do not change the essence of such statements” (case No. 2K-173-1073/2025).

The discussion contained a great deal of pessimistic realism – we live in a world of crumbling forms. Nevertheless, our duty is to participate in the process properly and to stand firmly on the side of justice, regardless of the balance of power and the fragility of forms.

An analogous principle is required by the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: according to the International Court of Justice (2007 judgment), the Convention obliges states to take action even when the actions of an individual state could not, by themselves, prevent genocide, because the desired result may be achieved through the combined actions of several states. *- At the Forum, the quotation was incorrectly attributed to the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

Recording of the discussion in Lithuanian.

Photos by the forum organizer.

Although children are currently recognised as full holders of human rights within both national and international legal systems, the effective implementation of children’s rights in practice continues to face significant challenges. Therefore, the primary aim of the monograph “Children’s Rights in Central and Eastern Europe: Comparative Analysis with a Spotlight on Lithuania”, prepared by the LCSS Law Institute, is to contribute to the improvement of child protection systems by providing evidence-based insights and recommendations.

In this book, researchers from the three Baltic States, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, Croatia, and Romania examine various aspects of children’s rights as enshrined in constitutional, civil, administrative, labour, and criminal law across the Central and Eastern European region. The volume also addresses emerging twenty-first-century issues, including inclusive education for children with disabilities, the rights of children belonging to national minorities, and children’s rights to privacy and personal data protection, among others. The comparative analysis of the Lithuanian legal system and those of other countries applied in this monograph is particularly valuable for policymakers, practitioners, and the academic community, as it enables the identification of good practices and learning from the experiences of different countries. At the same time, the publication fills an important gap in the academic literature by focusing on Central and Eastern Europe, a region that has often been underrepresented and overlooked in global discussions on children’s rights.

The book, published in open access by the internationally recognized publisher Springer Nature, will be available to interested audiences worldwide without any financial obligations.

The open-access publication of this collective monograph was supported by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT) through funding allocated to the LCSS Law Institute project “An Interdisciplinary Dialogue Among International Researchers on Children’s Rights: Publishing a Collective Monograph with a Foreign Publisher” (VAIKAI), Contract No. S-LISs-25-3.

The open-access book is available in English here.

As of 6 January 2026, the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (LCSS) will be led by Dr Dovilė Pūraitė-Andrikienė, who was selected for the position of Deputy Director of the LCSS and Head of the Law Institute following a competitive selection process concluded at the end of 2025.

Dr Pūraitė-Andrikienė has been working as a researcher at the Lithuanian Law Institute, and subsequently at the LCSS Institute of Law, since 2018. Her main research interests include Lithuanian and comparative constitutional law, constitutional justice, human rights, legal protection of vulnerable groups, and European Union law. She has published more than 35 academic works (monographs, research studies, journal articles). A significant number of her publications has appeared in journals indexed in the Web of Science and/or Scopus databases and have been released by internationally recognized publishers. She has also served as the scientific editor of several collective volumes. In addition, Dovilė is an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law of Vilnius University and, since 2022, a member of the Young Academy of the Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. From 2023 to 2025, she served as a Science and Innovation Adviser of the Research Council of Lithuania at the Ministry of Justice of the Republic of Lithuania. We warmly congratulate our colleague Dovilė and wish her every success and inspiration in leading the team of legal scholars, as well as in continuing and further developing the Institute’s research activities.

We also express our sincere gratitude to Dr Ingrida Mačernytė-Panomariovienė, who led the LCSS Institute of Law from early 2021. During her tenure, the Institute’s researchers actively conducted research, published articles in international journals, as well as book chapters and monographs with prestigious academic publishers, and participated in national and international projects. We wish Ingrida continued success in her academic pursuits, many inspiring ideas, and meaningful future research endeavours.

Dr Raimonda Bublienė, a postdoctoral fellow at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, participating in the postdoctoral project “Multiple Discrimination and Labour Income: A Comparative Analysis of Legal Regulations in European Countries” (MEDALIC), took part in the 15th international conference “Work and Non-Work, Today. Reframing the Issue through an Interdisciplinary Perspective”, organized in Bergamo (Italy) by ADAPT’s International School of Higher Education in Labour and Industrial Relations.

At the conference, Dr Bublienė delivered a presentation entitled “Labour Income and Dimension of Multiple Discrimination.” She introduced the research problematics and methodology of the ongoing MEDALIC project. Discussing the phenomenon of multiple discrimination, the researcher noted that individuals may simultaneously belong to several vulnerable groups and as a result experience specific forms of discrimination. For example, the intersection of gender and racial stereotypes can significantly disadvantage immigrant women.

According to the researcher, the main labour market issues resulting from such discrimination relate to access to employment and the legal regulation in European countries concerning equal pay for equal work or work of equal value between men and women, which has a direct impact on labour income. Additional challenges arise from the fragmented anti-discrimination legal framework, inadequate judicial response, and the limited capacity of legal measures alone to address labour income inequalities. Therefore, she stressed the importance of examining how labour income and multiple discrimination manifest in employment relations within the context of EU anti-discrimination law and the case law of the Court of Justice of the European Union, using statistical data based on gender, age, and other grounds of discrimination.