A Lithuanian court has returned Mikhail Benyash's residence permit*.

On December 15, 2022, Mikhail Benyash* reported that the regional office of the Ministry of Justice demanded that the Krasnodar Bar Association disbar him. The lawyers pointed out that disbarment is provided for serious violations, and the grounds cited by the Ministry of Justice do not apply to them. The Qualification Commission of the Krasnodar Krai Bar Association reviewed and found violations of professional ethics in the Telegram posts of lawyer Mikhail Benyash*. The commission included two representatives of the Ministry of Justice of the Krasnodar Territory, which initiated the proceedings, which violates the principles of adversarial proceedings and equality, the lawyer emphasized. On February 17, 2023, the Krasnodar Territory Bar Association stripped Mikhail Benyash* of his lawyer status for three years. In September 2024, the lawyer filed a lawsuit against the Krasnodar Territory Bar Association and the Federal Bar Association, demanding that his disbarment be declared illegal. The lawyer himself reported the court's decision, which found the reason for the trips valid, allowing for the exception to this rule established by law banning frequent travel, by publishing a translation of the decision on his Telegram channel.

The court's decision emphasized that the Migration Department must examine each individual situation when revoking a residence permit to ensure proportionality, and its decision must be thoroughly reasoned. In this case, however, the department limited itself to a formal assertion of a violation of the law without providing detailed arguments. Ultimately, the Supreme Administrative Court of Lithuania found that the trial court "inadequately assessed the validity and legality" of the Migration Department's decision and unreasonably dismissed Benyash's appeal.

It should be noted that in his appeal, Benyash cited precedents in the form of two Supreme Administrative Court decisions that a trip to the Russian Federation or Belarus alone cannot serve as grounds for revoking a residence permit: in those cases, the court also recognized the right of relatives to travel to accompany minors to relatives.

"The decision is lawful and well-founded. "We are great, but the positivists are not," Benyash commented on the court's decision to a "Caucasian Knot" correspondent.

As a reminder, Benyash and his Lithuanian lawyer previously challenged Judge Sigita Fomicheva for obstructing the questioning of a representative of the Migration Department. The plaintiff's challenge was denied without a specific explanation of the reasons for the decision. The lawyer's main argument in court was the objective necessity of the trip: he could not meet his son anywhere but Minsk, since the route to Lithuania was determined not by him, but by the child's mother, who was guided primarily by his interests.

Mikhail Benyash* is a Krasnodar lawyer known for his involvement in cases of those detained at rallies, who was subject to high-profile criminal prosecution for the use of violence against a government official, and was subsequently fined for discrediting the army. At the end of 2022, Benyash* was added to the list of foreign agents, suspended from conducting business, and at the beginning of 2023, he was stripped of his lawyer status, according to a biographical note prepared by the "Caucasian Knot."

* is included in the register of foreign agents.

** Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) is banned in Russia.