A draft constitutional amendment to grant citizens individual access to the Constitutional Court is planned to be introduced to the parliament.
The amendment has been registered by a third of Lithuania’s 141 parliamentarians, mainly members of the political groups of the ruling Lithuanian Farmers and Greens Union and the Social Democratic Labor Party.
The bill calls for allowing any person who has exhausted all other available means of legal protection to turn to the Constitutional Court over the conformity of a law or an act of the Seimas, the president and the government with the Constitution if he or she believes that a decision based on the legislation has violated his or her constitutional rights or freedoms.
Currently, only the Seimas, a group of lawmakers, the president, the government and courts can directly turn to the Constitutional Court.
The Seimas discussed a similar amendment during its 2017 spring session, but the bill fell four votes short of passing the first reading.
A constitutional amendment must be debated and voted on twice by the Seimas, with an interval of at least three months between the votes, and requires a two-thirds majority, or 94 votes, to be adopted.