We would like to invite students from Lithuania and around the world to undertake a summer internship at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences. The summer internship is a two-month (July–August) scientific project carried out accordin to an individual programme. Each internship will be supervised by an academic mentor – a researcher at the Law Institute. This is an excellent opportunity to work alongside experienced researchers, develop academic writing and presentation skills, and gain valuable professional experience. In addition, the internship is paid – students will receive a stipend of €2,000 (€1,000 per month). International students will be provided with additional funding for accommodation.

This year, the Law Institute offers students a choice between two research topics selected by the Research Council of Lithuania as eligible for funded placements.

The topic proposed by Dr Ingrida Kerušauskaitė-Palmer is: “Understanding geopolitical strategic corruption risks and mitigation measures in the context of the 2024 parliamentary elections Lithuania.” The intern’s research will consider geopolitical strategic corruption challenges and controls in the context of the electoral processes in Lithuania’s 2024 parliamentary elections. The intern will present their work at two conferences, including a dedicated two-day programme at the University of Cambridge, and prepare a science popularisation article.

The topic proposed by Dr Agnė Limantė is: “Generative Artificial Intelligence in Courts: Legal Regulation and the First Cases in Selected European States.” The intern will deepen their knowledge of the application of generative artificial intelligence in courts and acquire practical skills that will open pathways to an academic or professional career in legal innovation. The internship will also provide the student who chooses this topic with an excellent opportunity to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the work of courts and to contribute to one of the most relevant law and technology debates in Europe.

Applicants wishing to participate in the student summer internship competition implemented by the Research Council of Lithuania must submit their applications by 23 April 2026. For information on eligibility and where to submit applications, see https://lmt.lrv.lt/en/research-funding/career-development-mobility-and-networking-opportunities/funding-for-students-research-projects-summer-schollarships/

The Research Council of Lithuania, under its funding instrument “Applied Research Projects”, has awarded funding to the project “Assessment of the Application and Execution of the Arrest Penalty in the Lithuanian Legal System” (ARBA), implemented by the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences (hereinafter – LCSS LI). The project will be carried out by the LCSS LI research team during the period 2 March 2026 to 28 February 2027.

Given that the arrest penalty has been applied and enforced in Lithuania for several decades, there is a need to conduct research from both legal and criminological perspectives, particularly as it has not been systematically examined and its enforcement practice has lacked consistency.

The aim and objectives of the research are to assess the practice of the application and enforcement of the arrest penalty, to determine the categories of persons to whom the arrest penalty is typically applied in Lithuania, to analyse the social impact of the arrest penalty on detainees. All of this will be carried out with a view to determining the appropriateness of the arrest penalty and possible alternatives within the Lithuanian legal system.

In order to collect data on the socio-demographic characteristics of sentenced persons, the conditions of enforcement of the penalty, and subjective assessments of the impact of the arrest penalty on the social environment and family ties, the project team will conduct a questionnaire survey of persons serving the arrest penalty. Semi-structured interviews with prison staff will be used to collect data on their perspectives on issues related to the enforcement of the arrest penalty, while expert interviews with district court judges and prosecutors will help to assess the appropriateness of the application of the arrest penalty and the prospects for improving its legal regulation.

Having analysed the application and enforcement of the arrest penalty, the project researchers will formulate and present research-based recommendations and proposals for improving the application and/or legal regulation of the arrest penalty.

The research team of the project consists of: Dr. Rokas Uscila (project leader), Dr. Skirmantas Bikelis, Dr. Darius Pranka, Ignas Kromerovas, Brigita Kavaliauskaitė and Akvilė Tamulytė.

The project is funded by the Research Council of Lithuania (LMTLT), Contract No. S-REP-26-6.

More information about the project here.

We are pleased to announce that the Research Council of Lithuania has awarded funding for the postdoctoral fellowship project of Dr Gabrielė Taminskaitė-Kočiūnė, a researcher at the Law Institute of the Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, entitled “Work–Life Balance: Legal Measures and Their Implementation” (LEGATO). The project will be carried out from 1 November 2025 to 31 October 2027.

The research will analyse the legal measures that ensure work–life balance in Lithuania, their goals, and their practical application. It will examine how the requirements arising from European Union and international law are integrated into the national legal system, particularly in Lithuania (e.g., the obligation to ensure a child’s relationship with both parents and to create opportunities for mothers to return more smoothly to the labour market), as well as identify legal measures that are applied exclusively at the national level.

The novelty of the study lies in its aim to identify and reveal which legal instruments (together with the services and measures they guarantee), designed to ensure work–life balance, are, should be, and could be made available not only to families but also to single, working-age individuals without legally recognised family obligations.

By employing a comparative analysis method and using publicly available indicators such as the standard of living of society and its individual groups, health levels, life satisfaction, the national average wage, demographic trends, and other relevant data, Dr Taminskaitė-Kočiūnė will seek to identify good foreign legal practices that could be adopted, as well as those that should be avoided, in ensuring work–life balance.

The project also plans to publish a monograph in Lithuanian summarizing the research findings, which will conclude with recommendations for addressing the issues examined. Interim research findings will also be presented at scientific conferences and published in science communication (popular science) articles.

Postdoctoral Fellow – Dr Gabrielė Taminskaitė-Kočiūnė. – Dr. Gabrielė Taminskaitė-Kočiūnė.

Postdoctoral Fellowship supervisor – prof. dr. Ingrida Mačernytė-Panomariovienė.

The project is funded Lietuvos mokslo taryba (LMTLT), sutarties Nr. S-PD-23-106/5T-1.

More information about the project here.

When discussing the January 1991 events, the Lithuanian academic community still lacks deeper theoretical insights into the concepts of crime, injured party, and victim in the specific context of this crime. Therefore, the object of this article is the crime of the January events themselves and the victim, or injured party, as defined within the Lithuanian legal system, as well as the ways in which the victims reflect upon and interpret themselves.

The author of the article, researcher Monika Rogers, emphasizes that the victim of the January 13th events, as constructed in Lithuanian legal, criminological, and victimological discourses, differs from the typical “ideal victim” of international crimes in that they are neither weak nor passive, and thus do not conform to the classical definition of the “ideal victim.” In legal discourse, the victims of these events are portrayed as an especially significant part of the Lithuanian political nation – active defenders of Freedom who defended the Lithuanian State and its independence.

Having analyzed interviews with victims and witnesses of the January 13th events, the researcher concludes that some injured persons find it difficult to accept the label of “hero” or even to acknowledge their status as victims. At the same time, they reject identification with the role of a passive victim and instead present themselves as dignified and proactive individuals.

The open-access article is available here.

The project “The January 13th Case and Events: A Legal, Criminological and Historical Research” (SAUSIO13), on the basis of which the article was prepared, was funded under the 2016–2024 Programme for Lithuanian Studies and Dissemination by the Research Council of Lithuania, Contract No. S-LIP-20-71.

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.