Lithuania’s main administrative court has thrown out a lower court’s decision to fine a newspaper editor for an anti-Semitic article in 2004, causing the local Jewish community, who initially saluted the guilty verdict, to request a new case.
In July of this year, Vitas Tomkus, the editor of Respublika, was fined for “instigating ethnic and religious enmity” by the Vilnius district court after his newspaper published an article that displayed a crude portrayal of a Jew holding a globe, under the headline “Who rules the world ?”
The country’s high administrative court has annulled this decision - the head of the Lithuanian Jewish community, Simonas Alperavicius, called for new charges to be filed against Tomkus, although technically the main court’s rulings are not subject to appeal.
Respublika was the first independent Lithuanian daily newspaper, known for its exposés against organized crime. According to its publisher, the paper’s Lithuanian and Russian editions have a weekday circulation of 70,000.