Sajjad M was one of the first asylum-seekers to enter Lithuania from Belarus in the summer of 2021, after having fled his home country Iraq. In an attempt to access protection in Europe, many more people on the move from the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa would make use of Belarus’s declared opening of this route. In response, Lithuania hastily declared a state of emergency, began forcibly returning people at the border, denied effective access to asylum, and held thousands of asylum-seekers in detention, leaving Sajjad M. detained in Lithuania for nearly one year.

On 8 June 2022, while still detained, he independently filed an application to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) against Lithuania for multiple violations of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Since arriving in Germany, Sajjad M has applied for asylum and continues to pursue his case before the ECtHR with the support of Equal Rights Beyond Borders, the Lithuanian Red Cross, and ECCHR.

On arriving in Belarus in the summer of 2021, Sajjad M headed to the Lithuanian border and expressed his wish for asylum to a Lithuanian officer. Yet without receiving any form of registration or assistance, he was handcuffed and transferred to the improvised Druskininkai detention camp. He would spend the next year in three different detention sites, enclosed by fences and surveilled by cameras and armed military personnel.

Following a failed attempt to escape the second detention camp, an officer pepper-sprayed Sajjad directly into his face then set a dog on him which bit his arms, shoulder and thigh. He was subsequently held for a few hours in a refrigerated container and then beaten before being returned to the camp.

The conditions at the first two camps were also catastrophic: tents were overcrowded and bathrooms overflowed and lacked clean and/or hot water. Lithuanian authorities subsequently held Sajjad for nine months in Kybartai, a repurposed prison, behind high concrete walls and barbed wire, including locked for a short period in an isolation cell with barred windows and securitized metal doors.

Sajjad struggled to receive any information from authorities or from his government-assigned lawyer about his asylum claim as well as his detention. In his complaint to the European Court of Human Rights, Sajjad M argued that Lithuania had unlawfully deprived him of his liberty, violating article 5 ECHR as well as article 3 for the conditions in the three detention sites, for which he also had no effective legal remedy.

As larger numbers of people on the move began arriving to seek asylum in Lithuania from Belarus in 2021, Lithuania announced a state of emergency and adopted laws breaching their international and EU law obligations. These reforms subjected asylum-seekers arriving at the border either to mass pushbacks, or to automatic and unchallengeable detention.

NGOs reported harassment, humiliation, and use of force by officers, as well as a lack of medical care at the impromptu and ill-equipped sites in which they were detained. Asylum-seekers were also denied access to sufficient information, interpretation, or genuine legal assistance and had their asylum applications rejected after sham procedures.

In 2022, the European Court of Justice found that the Lithuania’s regime of mass returns and automatic detention contravened EU law. However, the EU’s new crisis and force majeure regulation was drafted partially in response to the situation at the Lithuanian / Belarus border in 2021 and 2022 and what it described as the “facilitation of movement … with the aim of destabilizing the Union”. In situations of “mass influx of third-country nationals”, this regulation allows States to delay registration and access to asylum, as well as expand border procedures.