Application of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights in the Courts of Lithuania

This chapter examines the application of the European Union Charter of Fundamental Rights (CFR) as a direct standard for constitutional review in Lithuania. As specified further in the text, constitutional review in Lithuania is carried out by the Constitutional Court and administrative courts, notably the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania. The chapter also briefly looks into the issue of the role the CFR plays in the fundamental rights review carried out by other competent entities. With these objectives in mind, the jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court, the case law of administrative courts and courts of general competence as well as publicly available materials of domestic human rights institutions are looked at. The author also refers to analysis carried out previously, notably by a team of researchers who examined various aspects of the application of the CFR and also conducted a survey on how well the CFR is known among Lithuanian lawyers and how often it is used as an instrument in their work. The chapter seeks to answer questions designed by the coordinators of the overall research project. These pertain to the relationship between Lithuanian fundamental rights and those of the CFR, comparison of the fundamental rights catalogues contained in the Lithuanian Constitution and the CFR, the level of protection offered by the two systems, the structure of the fundamental rights control in the Lithuanian legal system, the role the fundamental rights of the CFR play in national monitoring and, ultimately, the existence of examples of court decisions or decisions of the competent constitutional or fundamental rights review bodies that already apply the CFR as a direct standard of such review.