Red Cross questions Lithuania on trying to block migrants

VILNIUS – The Red Cross warned Wednesday that Lithuania's determination to crook distant immigrants attempting to transverse successful from neighboring Belarus does not comply with planetary law.

Lithuania, a subordinate of the European Union, has faced a surge of mostly Iraqi migrants successful the past fewer months. It says that's owed to retaliation by Belarus’ authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko aft the EU enactment sanctions connected his state implicit an aerial piracy incident. The Lithuanian Interior Ministry this week distributed a video changeable from a chopper showing ample groups of immigrants being escorted to Lithuania’s borderline by Belarusian borderline defender vehicles.

On Tuesday, Lithuania said it reserved the close to usage unit to halt specified amerciable migration and turned distant 180 radical attempting to participate the country. But rights groups noted that each nations person an work to support susceptible people.

“Pushbacks of radical seeking asylum are not compatible with the Geneva Convention connected Refugee Status, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights and different quality rights instruments” Egle Samuchovaite, programme manager for Lithuania's Red Cross, told The Associated Press.

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Samuchovaite besides pointed retired that rejecting the admittance of susceptible radical into the state would enactment them into an unsafe environment, trapped betwixt 2 countries.

“In the lack of a carnal borderline obstruction with Belarus, the question arises arsenic to however to guarantee that determination is nary disproportionate usage of unit against asylum seekers, which by immoderate means could not beryllium justified,” she said, adding that the Red Cross understands the state’s challenges successful protecting its border.

Lithuania, a federation of little than 3 cardinal people, has nary carnal barriers for its 679-kilometer (420-mile) agelong borderline with Belarus. Some 4,090 migrants, astir of them from Iraq, person crossed this twelvemonth from Belarus into Lithuania.

Another 35 radical crossed into Lithuania illegally connected Wednesday, according to the State Border Guard Service, but this was importantly little than the triple-digit numbers of erstwhile days.

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Belarus claimed Wednesday that a “non-Slavic” idiosyncratic died from injuries astatine a borderline municipality but Lithuania dismissed the study arsenic propaganda from a hostile regime.

“This is nonsense, a Brothers Grimm fairy tale,” Lithuania Interior Minister Agne Bilotaite told reporters.

Defense Minister Arvydas Anusauskas called the study “an evident provocation. Lithuania is nether hybrid onslaught and spreading specified accusation is simply a classical illustration of this process.”

Later Wednesday, the Belarusian State Border Committee claimed that 5 Iraqi migrants who were forcibly expelled to Belarus from Lithuania had injuries, including canine bites, and had been hospitalized.

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