Lithuania vows to process migrants' asylum requests by November

VILNIUS – Asylum requests from illegal migrants who have crossed the Lithuanian-Belarusian border this year should be processed by November, Evelina Gudzinskaite, director of Lithuania's Migration Department, says.

"We are now fully focusing on the processing and the plan is to do that by November, if not all of them, then to process the maximum possible number of asylum requests," she told BNS on Monday.

Specialists at the department process several dozen requests a week, Gudzinskaite said, adding that some 60 people are processing requests. The human resources are now sufficient but effort is being made to do the job as effectively as possible, she said.

„We have sufficient capacity right now but the challenge is how to enable it as we have many new staff members and we needed to invest time to train them, and the biggest part of this challenge is to fully enable them," the director of the Migration Department said.

Over 4,100 illegal migrants have cross the Lithuanian Belarusian border so far this year. 2,800 have lodged asylum requests, and over 600 of them have been processed already. No migrants have been granted asylum so far: 320 requests have been rejected and asylum procedures in the cases of another 325 persons have been discontinued.

Such procedures can be discontinued in cases when migrants flee the country or return to their country of origin, Gudzinskaite said.