12. The Development and Prospects of the Lithuanian Constitutional Justice Model

Both Lithuanian and foreign constitutional law studies highlight that Chapter VIII of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania consolidated a rather minimalist conception of the jurisdiction exercised by the Constitutional Court. It was resolved to take further significant steps in this area only in 2019, after introducing amendments to the Constitution consolidating the individual constitutional complaint, i.e. 26 years after the establishment of the Constitutional Court in Lithuania. Regardless of these important changes, apart from certain rare exceptions, there is little discussion in the Lithuanian legal community, political circles and society in general about the optimality of the Lithuanian constitutional justice model, its development and prospects. Therefore, taking a look at the Lithuanian constitutional justice model as the object under scrutiny, the aim of this contribution is to shed more light on the development and prospects of the Lithuanian constitutional justice model. In order to achieve this, the following tasks are undertaken and dealt with: (1) to overview the circumstances related to the choice of the Lithuanian constitutional justice model in 1992–1993, (2) to discuss the main features of the Lithuanian constitutional justice model and assess the scope of the powers of the Constitutional Court against the context of other European states, (3) to identify mechanisms of the development of this model during 1993–2019 and (4) to analyse further prospects for the development of this model.