"The government failed to conduct an effective investigation into its role in US-led rendition and secret detention programmes. Discrimination against lesbians, gay men, and bisexual and transgender people was widespread," the report says.
During hearings in the European Parliament in March, Amnesty International accused Lithuania and Nordic countries of failure to make sufficient effort to investigate their alleged involvement in the US secret rendition and detention program.
The organization also criticizes Lithuanian prosecutors who have refused to resume a pre-trial investigation, despite receiving new information about a flight on which suspected terrorist Abu Zubaydah might have been flown to Lithuania from Morocco in 2005. On 27 October, lawyers of Zubaydah, a Palestinian detained in Guantanamo Bay, filed a complaint in the European Court of Human Rights, alleging that he was unlawfully transferred to Lithuania in 2005, where he was tortured at a secret detention facility.
Lithuania's Prosecutor General's Office said the information provided by the organization "is not essential and can have no influence on decision in the case."
Lithuania launched an investigation into CIA prison allegations in the country following reports by American TV channel ABC News in 2009 about a secret CIA prison situated in Antaviliai area near Vilnius. The secret parliamentary probe carried out in Lithuania showed that CIA-related planes entered Lithuania's airspace in 2003-2006 several times. The investigations failed, however, to identify if any suspected terrorist were actually brought to Lithuania.
Following the parliamentary investigation, Lithuanian prosecutors opened an investigation but terminated the probe last January, with prosecutor Mindaugas Dūda saying hat there was no sufficient evidence to claim that premises in Vilnius and near the city had been equipped for detention of prisoners.
In its annual report, Amnesty International also reminds of proposals to adopt amendments to the Code on Administrative Offences, stipulating fines for "denigrating constitutional moral values and the principles of family" as well as "organizing events contradicting social morality", and proposed amendments to the Civil Code to ban gender reassignment surgery.
The NGO also criticizes the Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information which states that minors are negatively influenced by information that denigrates family values, or encourages different notions of marriage and family than those enshrined in the Constitution and the Civil Code, i.e., heterosexual marriage.
