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The securitization of the COVID-19 pandemic allowed governments in democratic countries to introduce extraordinary management measures that involved limiting various human rights. However, sound democratic governance always requires public debate on any policies introduced. These debates occur in multiple arenas and the parliament is among the most notable. In the context of human rights, some studies identified parliament as one of the most important agencies that promote human rights protection and oversee executive authorities (Lyer, 2019; Ncube, 2020). This article examines whether and how Lithuanian parliamentarians and government members addressed human rights during the Seimas debates when issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic were discussed. It investigates whether the Seimas could be considered an important agent contributing to the oversight of human rights in Lithuania. The article employs transcripts from the Seimas plenary debates as a data source, particularly speeches from the government question time from 2020.03 to 2021.01. The results of the qualitative thematic analysis revealed that human rights were generally not the main topic of the COVID-19 pandemic debates on the Seimas floor during government hours. It also showed that the attitudes of political parties toward specific human rights tended to shift when they switched from the opposition to the ruling majority and vice versa.

Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Public Policy, July 5, 2021, Topic : T03 / POLICY, POLITICS AND POLITICAL REGIME, Panel: T03P08 / Populism and policy making.

Paper presented at the 5th International Conference on Public Policy, July 9, 2021, Topic : T08 / Discourse & Critical Research, Panel: T08P05 / Policy Discourse And Critical Policy Research

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Paper presented at the 26th International conference "Information Society and University Studies" (IVUS2021), April 23, 2021, Kaunas, Lithuania.

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This paper analyses debates of the Lithuanian Parliament (the Seimas) during the first and the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic (covering the period from January 2020 to January 2021), attempting to establish how the previous and the newly elected Parliament discussed certain aspects of the pandemic and its containment. For this purpose, the authors automatically extracted the transcripts of all the debates that took place in the Seimas during the period under study (https://e-seimas.lrs.lt/portal/documentSearch/lt) and devised a content analytic dictionary covering two broad themes: "COVID-19 pandemic" and "human rights." In addition, the first theme was divided into subtopics covering: 1) general references to the pandemic, 2) references to public life restrictions, 3) references to medical measures of fighting the disease, and 4) references to distance learning/working. The results after an automatic and expert analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak and mass protests after the presidential elections in Belarus resonated strongly on the Lithuanian parliament's agenda, as substantial increases of search terms related to "pandemic" and 'human rights" topics were detected in the floor debates. On the more specific level, the study revealed that the Parliament's debate during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic was dominated by the subtopic of "public life restrictions" and the subtopic "pandemic in general" was at the centre of Parliament's interest during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic ; Informatikos fakultetas ; Kauno technologijos universitetas ; Taikomosios informatikos katedra ; Vytauto Didžiojo universitetas

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1405.

ParlaMint is a multilingual set of comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after October 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1388. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (after November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the ParlaMint TEI-encoded corpora with the derived plain text version of the corpus along with TSV metadata on the speeches. Also included is the 2.0 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. Note that there also exists the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, which is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1431.

ParlaMint 2.1 is a multilingual set of 17 comparable corpora containing parliamentary debates mostly starting in 2015 and extending to mid-2020, with each corpus being about 20 million words in size. The sessions in the corpora are marked as belonging to the COVID-19 period (from November 1st 2019), or being "reference" (before that date). The corpora have extensive metadata, including aspects of the parliament; the speakers (name, gender, MP status, party affiliation, party coalition/opposition); are structured into time-stamped terms, sessions and meetings; with speeches being marked by the speaker and their role (e.g. chair, regular speaker). The speeches also contain marked-up transcriber comments, such as gaps in the transcription, interruptions, applause, etc. Note that some corpora have further information, e.g. the year of birth of the speakers, links to their Wikipedia articles, their membership in various committees, etc. The corpora are encoded according to the Parla-CLARIN TEI recommendation (https://clarin-eric.github.io/parla-clarin/), but have been validated against the compatible, but much stricter ParlaMint schemas. This entry contains the linguistically marked-up version of the corpus, while the text version is available at http://hdl.handle.net/11356/1432. The ParlaMint.ana linguistic annotation includes tokenization, sentence segmentation, lemmatisation, Universal Dependencies part-of-speech, morphological features, and syntactic dependencies, and the 4-class CoNLL-2003 named entities. Some corpora also have further linguistic annotations, such as PoS tagging or named entities according to language-specific schemes, with their corpus TEI headers giving further details on the annotation vocabularies and tools. The compressed files include the ParlaMint.ana XML TEI-encoded linguistically annotated corpus; the derived corpus in CoNLL-U with TSV speech metadata; and the vertical files (with registry file), suitable for use with CQP-based concordancers, such as CWB, noSketch Engine or KonText. Also included is the 2.1 release of the data and scripts available at the GitHub repository of the ParlaMint project. As opposed to the previous version 2.0, this version corrects some errors in various corpora and adds the information on upper / lower house for bicameral parliaments. The vertical files have also been changed to make them easier to use in the concordancers.