- October 1, 2013
- 231
The Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania’s final decision: bilingual signboards are illegal
The Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania (Lietuvos vyriausiasis administracinis teismas – LVAT) has ruled that bilingual signboards with street names in the Šalčininkai District are unlawful: national acts state explicitly that street names should be rendered only in the state language. The court decision is ultimate, and it is not possible to appeal against it.
The self-government of the Šalčininkai District has been obliged to remove the bilingual signboards in Koleśniki, Ejszyszki, Dziewieniszki, Jaszuny, Turgiele, Podbrodzie, Biała Waka, and other locations. In case of noncompliance with the decision, the officials in charge will be punished with fines.
LVAT has pointed to the fact that no exceptional circumstances were identified in the case. In the leading case on street names the court has ruled that they should be inscribed only in Lithuanian .
The government’s representative in the Vilnius Region demanded that the signboards be removed. The self-government of the Šalčininkai District did not agree to the demands, explaining that “displaying signboards with street names falls within the senior’s area of responsibility”.
The self-government’s officials stated that it had been impossible to dislodge the signboards with Polish inscriptions, because “the inhabitants refused to remove the signboards from their houses as they had paid for them with their own money, and there is no law regulating signboards removal in a similar case.”
“According to the law, the national language of the Republic of Lithuania is the Lithuanian language (…), in the Republic of Lithuania, all the inscriptions displayed in public should be in the national language, the names of national communities, their informatory inscriptions, can be rendered in other language next to the state language. The street names, along with the names of buildings and other facilities should be written the way they are recorded in the address and proprietorship register” – decided LVAT.
The court stressed that the administration of the self-government did not produce evidence that the street names in a language other than Lithuanian are registered in the address and proprietorship register.
Tłumaczenie by Agata Weronika Chrobak w ramach praktyk w Europejskiej Fundacji Praw Człowieka, www.efhr.eu. Translated by Agata Weronika Chrobak within the framework of a traineeship programme of the European Foundation of Human Rights, www.efhr.eu.
