Lithuania wants “careful” cooperation with dictatorship

• 7.09.2011, 14:44

The Lithuania Foreign Minister, Audronius Azubalis, speaks against termination of the agreement on legal assistance with Belarus.

“There’s no need to terminate this agreement now. There’s movement of criminal community, there are issues regarding daily problems such as divorces, marriages, inheritance,” the minister told journalists on Wednesday, Interfax-Zapad reports.

He also underlined that a decision on whether to terminate the agreement or not would be taken not by the MFA, but by the government.

We remind that prominent Belarusian human rights activist Ales Byalyatski was arrested in August on the base of the information revealed by Poland and Lithuania to the Belarusian law enforcement bodies in frameworks of the legal assistance agreement.

Azubalis said that a new interdepartmental mechanism of providing the Belarusian authorities with the requested information was introduced on Wednesday at a sitting of the parliamentary Committee on Foreign Affairs.

The minister noted that the Lithuanian government agencies had reached an agreement on how to prevent misuse of Lithuania’s legal assistance.

According to earlier information, Poland decided to terminate the agreement with Belarus on rendering simplified legal assistance in criminal cases.