Lithuania's ICC Referral Puts Lukashenko's Crackdown Before the Court
Lithuania became the first state to refer the situation in Belarus to the International Criminal Court, invoking crimes against humanity committed during the post-2020 crackdown; the prosecutor opened a preliminary examination.
On 30 September 2024, Lithuania became the first state to refer the situation in Belarus to the International Criminal Court, asking the Prosecutor to investigate crimes against humanity committed during Alexander Lukashenko's crackdown on the 2020 protest movement. The Office of the Prosecutor, then led by Karim Khan, opened a preliminary examination.
The referral's legal architecture is what makes it viable. Belarus is not a member of the ICC, which would normally place it beyond the Court's reach. Lithuania's case rests on the argument that elements of the alleged crimes — the deportation and persecution of Belarusians forced across the border — were completed on the territory of Lithuania, an ICC member state. That is the same jurisdictional bridge the Court used to open its Bangladesh-Myanmar investigation into the Rohingya deportations.
At the ICC's 23rd Assembly of States Parties in December 2024, Pavel Latushka of the Belarusian opposition's United Transitional Cabinet presented evidence in support of the referral, citing an estimate of some 300,000 Belarusians displaced. That figure originates with the opposition and should be read as its claim rather than an established finding; the underlying pattern of mass detention, torture allegations and forced exile after 2020 is, however, extensively documented by international monitors.
What a referral can and cannot do is the crux. It opens a legal process; it does not deliver a defendant. Without custody of the accused, an ICC examination of Belarus is a long-horizon instrument — a matter of documenting and preserving a case against a sitting government, not of imminent prosecution.
The open question is whether other states join Lithuania's referral, broadening the political weight behind it, and whether the preliminary examination advances to a formal investigation. Reporting and primary documents via the ICC, Lithuania's Ministry of Justice, the Washington Times, and the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW).