Ropes & Gray Pro Bono Client Wins Against the Government of Lithuania Before the European Court of Human Rights—Findings of Multiple Violations of the European Convention on Human Rights

In The News
December 21, 2023

Ropes & Gray has successfully represented in the European Court of Human Rights its pro bono client Šarūnas Narbutas, a lawyer and a patient advocate in Lithuania, who spoke out against the Lithuanian Government for its mismanagement of healthcare services for cancer patients during the Covid pandemic and was then wrongly accused of taking money from a Spanish supplier for the provision of 300,000 Covid tests and of being a “de facto” official in retaliation. Šarūnas, a cancer patient himself, was subject to house-arrest and imprisoned without access to medical care, and his family assets were seized without proper grounds to do so.

This case concerned whether various remand measures in the context of the high-profile criminal investigation in Lithuania applied against Šarūnas Narbutas were compatible with the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.

A panel of seven judges of the European Court of Human Rights has now unanimously ruled that the Government of Lithuania was in breach of a number of fundamental human rights of the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms as well as a specific provision of Protocol 1 of the Convention: right to liberty and security; right to respect for private and family life; freedom of expression; and right to protection of property. Our client has also been awarded financial compensation as non-pecuniary damage, which the Lithuanian Government is required to pay within three months.

Dr Lincoln Tsang, head of Ropes & Gray’s European life sciences practice and co-counsel on the case, said: “It has been a privilege to work on Šarūnas’s case and we are delighted for him and his family that justice has finally been done. It was practically challenging to run the case during the Covid-19 pandemic and this successful outcome couldn’t have been achieved without the support of my co-counsel Elze Matulionyte and Rimante Tamulyte, who represented Šarūnas from the very beginning in Lithuania, and my colleagues in the London life sciences team, who assisted in preparing the submissions in an extremely tight timeframe.”

Elze Matulionyte, partner at ART Law Office, and Rimante Tamulyte, partner at Foxen Law Office, in Lithuania acted as co-counsel. The Ropes & Gray pro bono team working on the case included partner Lincoln Tsang and associates Daisy Bray, Patrick Doherty and Hannah Kerr-Peterson.

The Court judgment on the Case of Narbutas v Lithuania (Application no. 14139/21) can be found here.