When a Member of the Seimas boasted that the Genocide Center defeated Grant Gochin in court, Lithuania’s rule-of-law defense collapsed.
On April 1, 2021, a Member of the Lithuanian Seimas said what Lithuania’s diplomats spend their careers denying.
What the diplomats deny is also what foreign investors, partners, and law firms doing business in Lithuania need to know before they sign anything. The legal environment a state advertises is not always the legal environment a state operates. Foreign companies underwrite contracts, joint ventures, and capital allocations on the representation that Lithuania has European judicial independence. The April 1, 2021 floor speech is the State telling its own parliament that the representation is not accurate.
During the parliamentary debate over the dismissal of Adas Jakubauskas as director of the state Genocide and Resistance Research Centre of Lithuania, Mindaugas Puidokas of the Labour Party faction rose at the Seimas tribune. He defended the institution. He defended Lithuania’s “heroes.” He named Kazys Škirpa, Jonas Noreika, and Juozas Brazaitis. Then he named Grant Gochin.
The official Seimas stenogram records the sentence in Lithuanian: “Genocido centras iki šiol niekada nepasidavė spaudimui: gindamas Lietuvos garbę jis net laimėjo teismus prieš etatinį Lietuvos juodintoją G. A. Gočiną.” The Genocide Center, Puidokas said, had never yielded to pressure: defending Lithuania’s honor, it had even won court cases against the “professional blackener of Lithuania, G. A. Gochin.” Etatinis juodintojas — staff blackener, paid blackener — identifies a Jewish American citizen of Lithuanian descent as a salaried agent professionally engaged in defaming the country he has spent a decade asking to acknowledge the murder of his own family. That sentence is not a slip. It is a confession.
Lithuania tells Europe, the United States, Israel, and the IHRA that it is governed by the rule of law. It says its courts are independent. It says its prosecutors act neutrally. It says its state historical institutions are scholarly bodies. It says criticism of its Holocaust memory regime is misunderstanding, exaggeration, or foreign manipulation.
Then, from the floor of the Seimas, one of its own legislators explained the system in plain language. The court victory was not described as neutral adjudication. It was not described as a finding of fact. It was described as the defense of Lithuania’s honor.
That is the Soviet system with European stationery. The court is not the referee. The court is the weapon. The historical institution is not the scholar. It is the custodian of national myth. The Jewish litigant is not a claimant. He is the enemy of national honor. The ruling is not law. It is state vindication.
This doctrine has a name. The Soviet term is “telefonnoye pravo”. The Lithuanian-language analogue is “telefoninė teisė”. In English, “telephone law”. Britannica records it directly: in cases of political importance, judicial decisions were dictated by telephone calls from party officials to judges. The post-Soviet variant does not require the call. The architecture does the work. The court understands the direction of acceptable outcomes. The institution understands the boundaries of permissible truth. The old vocabulary was “anti-Soviet.” The new vocabulary is “Kremlin narrative.” The function is the same. The Member of the Seimas at the tribune did not invent the language. He recited the system. I grew up inside it. I recognize it.
The setting makes the sentence worse. The Seimas plenary morning sitting No. 42 was that day debating one motion: a Seimas Board proposal to dismiss the Director-General of LGGRTC. Seventeen LGGRTC historians had signed a letter to Speaker Viktorija Čmilytė-Nielsen documenting that the institution’s leadership had compromised research integrity. Universities and the Lithuanian Institute of History had refused cooperation. Mingailė Jurkutė, a senior LGGRTC historian, had been fired by Jakubauskas three weeks earlier for publishing a granular account of the politicization.
By a secret ballot, 79 MPs voted to dismiss Jakubauskas and four voted against, against a threshold of 71. Puidokas was on the losing side. The video excerpt runs thirty seconds. The surrounding speech does not soften it; it strengthens it. Puidokas’s broader floor remarks named Škirpa, Noreika, and Brazaitis as the figures the Center had been pressed to condemn, and framed the international and domestic pressure to revisit Lithuania’s honored heroes as coinciding with the propaganda of hostile forces.
These names are not incidental. Škirpa founded the Lithuanian Activist Front, whose antisemitic program prepared the political atmosphere for the June 1941 violence. Noreika signed orders connected to Jewish confinement, slave labor, property seizure, and the infrastructure of murder in Šiauliai county; his own granddaughter Silvia Foti has confirmed the documentary record in writing. Brazaitis led the Provisional Government whose record Lithuania has tried to launder through the false claim that the United States Congress “exonerated” him. Grant Gochin has documented the architecture across Rule of Law, One Way, The Doctrine Lithuania Never Revoked, and The Predicate to the Rescuer Fraud. I have written about the conversion mechanism in How Lithuania Converts Holocaust Evidence into State Innocence.
Puidokas did not isolate these issues. He linked them. Criticism of Holocaust collaborators becomes hostile propaganda. Jewish legal action becomes pressure against national heroes. A state institution’s court victory becomes the defense of national honor. The Seimas transcript becomes the confession. This is not rule of law. It is memory enforcement.
Telephone law produces refusals, not adjudications. The court does not lose. The court does not win. The court refuses to examine the evidence, because the evidence cannot survive examination on the merits. Forty-nine documented formal submissions by Grant Gochin to Lithuanian state bodies since 2015 confirm the architecture in operation. Eight lawsuits and international filings, including the European Court of Human Rights and a United Nations treaty body submission filed on International Holocaust Remembrance Day 2022. Eleven submissions to LGGRTC. Five Article 170-2 §1 prosecutor complaints. Eleven institutional submissions. Two submissions to the Journalist Ethics Inspector. Twelve formal letters. Every refusal is on file.
The pattern is uniform. The Vilnius Regional Administrative Court, in case No. eI-534-281/2019, ruled that it could not perform the LGGRTC’s prescribed functions. The Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania, in case No. eA-1768-624/2020, dismissed the appeal on April 1, 2020 — twelve months to the day before Puidokas’s tribune speech — and entered a €950 cost order against the plaintiff. The Vilnius District Prosecutor declined the first Article 170-2 §1 complaint, the second, and the third. The Heritage Department deflected. The Journalist Ethics Inspector declined investigation. The Parliament declined to hear the appeal because, it said, it does not assess facts. The Genocide Center, in March 2022, refused to re-open the matter on the grounds that the Administrative Courts had resolved it — the same Administrative Courts that had ruled they could not perform the LGGRTC’s functions.
Lithuania has refused to punish any Lithuanian for the murder of Jews while using criminal law against Jews who challenge the State’s preferred memory structure. The asymmetry is the system. Each body refers to the next. The cycle is closed by design. When Puidokas at the tribune said the Center won in court, he was not describing an adjudication. He was describing a refusal. He named the win. He did not name the merits, because there are no merits. The win is the refusal. The State boasts.
Lithuania’s standard deflection is that Holocaust glorification is the position of one party — the Conservative Homeland Union — or of fringe right-wing voices within it. The April 1, 2021 floor speech defeats that deflection. Mindaugas Puidokas was not a Conservative. He sat as a Labour Party MP — DPF, Darbo partijos frakcija — in opposition to the Šimonytė government. He held, at the same time, the Vice-Chairmanship of the Seimas Inter-Parliamentary Group for Relations with the State of Israel. The Kremlin-smear, partisan-defense, Gochin-naming template has captured the Lithuanian Seimas across party lines, including opposition MPs and Israel-friendship office-holders. The variable is not the party. The variable is the institution.
Three weeks later, the same Seimas voted 76 to 34 to confirm Arūnas Bubnys as the new Director-General. Algemeiner identified Bubnys as a Holocaust revisionist on the day of his confirmation. The cult survived by personnel replacement. On March 22, 2026, the Seimas-established expert council, chaired by Professor Arūnas Streikus, notified parliamentary leadership that it could not work with current LGGRTC leadership. Two directors after Jakubauskas, the same pathology persists. The April 1 dismissal was theatre.
Article 170-2 §1 is the second proof. The State has indicted Artur Fridman, a Jewish citizen of Lithuania, in Case No. 02-2-00512-24, a 220-page indictment under Article 170² §1 and Article 313 §2, for a Facebook post rooted in his family’s Soviet-veteran history. The same statute was not applied to Valdas Rakutis, a Member of the Seimas, for his January 27, 2021 IHRD article attributing Holocaust perpetration to Jews. Rakutis was not charged. Fridman was indicted under 220 pages. Grant Gochin has traced the asymmetry in The Rakutis Standard and The Prosecution of Artur Fridman. Telephone law is what selects which post becomes a 220-page indictment and which IHRD article becomes nothing.
The State also operates an apparatus for laundering. Lithuania honors rescuers and murderers simultaneously, then asks Jewish organizations to applaud the rescuers while remaining silent about the murderers. That is not reconciliation. It is laundering. Grant Gochin’s AJC & B’nai B’rith: The Jewish Community Is Entitled to the Record is part of the same structure. Lithuania does not merely falsify history. It recruits respectability to protect the falsification.
Lithuania has not been left in ignorance. The notice record is public. In January 2021, U.S. Ambassador Robert Gilchrist called Rakutis’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day remarks “shocking” and said they shamefully sought to accuse Jews of being perpetrators. The IHRA had already issued its 2019 statement on the Genocide Center’s Noreika findings. In September 2023, Yad Vashem Chairman Dani Dayan addressed the Seimas and said that names such as Noreika, Škirpa, and Krikštaponis do not add to Lithuania’s honor or to its adherence to appropriate norms of national remembrance. The point is not that Lithuania did not hear. The point is that it heard and persisted.
Puidokas’s sentence collapses the entire Lithuanian defense.
Lithuania cannot say the Genocide Center is merely a scholarly body when a Member of the Seimas praised it for defending national honor.
Lithuania cannot say the courts are neutral when a Member of the Seimas presented the court outcome as a national victory over a named Jewish claimant.
Lithuania cannot say Article 170² is neutral when the statute is used against Fridman and not against Rakutis.
Lithuania cannot say IHRA membership proves good faith when the core institutional conduct fits the very pattern of Holocaust distortion IHRA exists to confront. Grant Gochin has set out the case in Membership by Violation.
Lithuania cannot say it has evolved out of the Soviet system when its parliament still uses Soviet technique: name the enemy, discredit the evidence, weaponize the court, and call the outcome justice.
The court boast identifies the mechanism. Defending Lithuania’s honor identifies the motive. The target is the Jew who brings documents.
This is why Baltic Truth exists. With Andrejs Hramcovs, narrated by Dudu Fisher, our Dim Bom Productions team documented the Holocaust of bullets in the Baltic states. Puidokas’s Seimas-floor confession is a sequel. The Holocaust did not end with murder. It continued in monuments, in plaques, in street names, in state institutes, in court filings, in embassy letters, and in parliamentary speeches. Our new project, Ashes of Identity, addresses the same machinery. Memory undefended becomes memory occupied.
Lithuania shows how a state can join NATO, enter the European Union, sit inside IHRA, host ceremonies, condemn antisemitism in English, and still maintain a domestic historical architecture that protects men tied to the murder of Jews. It shows how post-Soviet states can adopt European vocabulary without internalizing European legal culture. It shows how rule of law can become branding.
A country governed by the rule of law does not need a parliamentarian to boast that a state agency defeated a Jewish critic in court. It does not treat litigation over Holocaust truth as an assault on national honor. It does not require descendants of murdered Jews to fight the same state institution for a decade while the institution recycles the same exonerations.
Lithuania does all of this. The Seimas transcript is not commentary. It is evidence.
On April 1, 2021, Mindaugas Puidokas did not merely defend Adas Jakubauskas. He defended the system. He identified Holocaust accountability as hostile pressure. He praised the Genocide Center’s court victories against Grant Gochin as defense of Lithuania’s honor. The architecture is intact. The phrasing is unchanged. The instruction does not need to be conveyed by phone. The institution understands.
That is enough.
Lithuania’s rule-of-law claim does not survive its own parliamentary record. The State confessed from the tribune. The only question left is whether Europe, Israel, the United States, foreign investors, allied governments, and Jewish institutions will pretend not to have heard it.