The Minority Treaties are treaties, League of Nations mandates,In the south West Africa Case the International Court of Justice noted that the mandates were always regarded as treaties or conventions. See International Law Reports, Elihu Lauterpacht, Cambridge University Press, 1971, , p. 93 and unilateral declarationsIn the Albanian Schools case the Permanent Court of International Justice held that Declarations made before the League Council were tantamount to a treaty. See International Human Rights in Context, Henry J. Steiner, Philip Alston, Ryan Goodman, Oxford University Press US, 2008, , p. 100 made by countries applying for membership in the League of Nations that conferred basic rights on all the inhabitants of the country without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion. The country concerned had to acknowledge the clauses of the treaty as fundamental laws of state and as obligations of international concern placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations. and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, Part I. - Future Constitution and Government of Palestine, C. Declaration, Chapter 4: Miscellaneous Provisions Most of the treaties entered into force after the Paris Peace Conference.
Background The protection of religious and minority rights had been a matter of international concern and the subject of protections ever since the days of the Peace of Westphalia.Essays on International Law and Organization, Leo Grossman, BRILL, 1984, , page 5 The 1878 Treaty of Berlin had a new type of provision that protected minorities in the Balkans and newly independent states' Great Power recognition was nominally conditional on the promise of guarantees of religious and civic freedoms for local religious minorities. Historian Carol Fink argues:
The imposed clauses on minority rights became requirements not only for recognition but were also, as in the cases of Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania, conditions for receiving specific grants of territory.Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection (2004), p. 37.
Fink reports that these provisions were generally not enforced—no suitable mechanism existed and the Great Powers had little interest in doing so. Protections were part of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 and became increasingly important after World War II.Jennifer Jackson Preece, "Minority rights in Europe: from Westphalia to Helsinki." Review of international studies 23#1 (1997): 75–92.
At the Paris Peace Conference the Supreme Council established The Committee on New States and for the Protection of Minorities. All the new successor states were compelled to sign minority rights treaties as a precondition of diplomatic recognition. It was agreed that although the new States had been recognized, they had not been 'created' before the signatures of the final Peace Treaties.Oscar I. Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919) (Columbia University Press, 1933), p. 342. Clemenceau noted in an aide-memoire attached to the Polish treaty that the minority protections were consistent with diplomatic precedent:
The new treaties gave minorities the right to appeal directly to the League or UN General Assembly. In the case of the Mandates and the UN Partition Plan for Palestine compromissory clauses provide for the International Court's jurisdiction.Summary of the work of the League of Nations, January 1920-March 1922, League of Nations Union, 1922, p. 4 and United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181, Part I. - Future Constitution and Government of Palestine, C. Declaration The victorious powers attempted to ensure the stable development of the region between defeated Germany and Soviet Russia, a region characterized by the existence of many ethnic groups and the emergence of new nations. The idea behind the Minority Treaties was that by subjecting those countries to the scrutiny of others and to the threat of sanction and intervention from the newly created international body, the League of Nations, the rights of minorities would be safeguarded.
As with most of the principles adopted by the League, the Minorities Treaties were a part of the Wilsonian idealist approach to international relations, and as with the League itself, the Minority Treaties were increasingly ignored by the respective governments, with the entire system mostly collapsing in the late 1930s. Despite the political failure they remained the basis of international law. After World War II the legal principles were incorporated in the UN Charter and a host of international human rights treaties.
Many international law norms and customary practices developed in the inter-war years by the League of Nations are still in use today. The procedures for managing intrastate and inter-ethnic issues include international supervision, regional economic unions, minority protection, plebiscites, and territorial partition. The Palestine and Bosnian Partition Plans and European Union practice are modern examples of conditioning recognition of statehood on human rights, democracy, and minority protection guarantees.see the discussion on pp. 97-98 and footnote 353 in Managing Babel: The International Legal Protection of Minorities in the Twentieth Century, Li-ann Thio, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2005
Bilateral treaties There were several bilateral Minority Treaties, each signed between one of the countries in question and the League. The treaties were signed between the League and some of the newly established nations: Poland, Yugoslavia (also known then as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes), Czechoslovakia. Similar treaties were also imposed on Greece and Entente-allied Romania in exchange for their territorial enlargement, and on some of the nations defeated in the First World War (Hungary, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey). At the same time, Albania, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia and, outside of Europe, Iraq were persuaded to accept minority obligations as part of the terms of their admission to the League of Nations.Jennifer Jackson Preece, Minority Rights in Europe: From Westphalia to Helsinki. Review of International Studies, 1997, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
The Polish treaty (signed in June 1919, as the first of the Minority Treaties, and serving as the template for the subsequent ones)Aimee Genell, "Were the Minority Treaties a Failure? " - H-net 2005 review of Carole Fink. 2004. Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection. Cambridge University Press. is often referred to as either the Little Treaty of Versailles or the Polish Minority Treaty; the Austrian, Czechoslovak and Yugoslavian treaties are referred to as Treaty of St Germain-en-Laye (1919); the Romanian treaty as the Treaty of Paris (1919), the Greek as the Treaty of Sèvres (1920); the Hungarian as the Treaty of Trianon (1920), the Bulgarian as the Treaty of Neuilly-sur-Seine (1919), and the Turkish as the Treaty of Lausanne (1923). In most of the above cases the minority treaties were only one of many articles of the aforementioned treaties.
List of unilateral declarations Declaration by the government of Albania, issued 2 October 1921.Text in League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 9. pp. 174-179 Declaration by the government of Lithuania, issued 12 May 1922.Text in League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 22, pp. 394-399 Declaration by the government of Latvia, issued 19 July 1923, heard by the Council of the League on 11 September 1923.Lamey B. Die Minderheiten in Lettland. Riga, Berlin: Bernhard Lamey-Verlag, 1931, S. 39 Declaration by the government of Bulgaria, issued 29 September 1924.Text in League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 29, pp. 118-121. Declaration by the government of Greece, issued 29 September 1924.Text in League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 29, pp. 124-127.
List of bilateral treaties Austrian–Czechoslovak treaty, concluded 7 June 1920. Ratifications exchanged in Vienna, March 10, 1921. Registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 29 March 1921.League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 3, pp. 190–224 Supplemented by additional protocol relating to Carlsbad on 23 August 1920.League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 3, pp. 226–232. German-Polish Accord on East Silesia (also called Geneva Convention), concluded 15 May 1922. The treaty dealt with the constitutional and legal future of Upper Silesia which partly became Polish territory after the Upper Silesia plebiscite of 20 March 1921.Full Text of the German-Polish Accord on East Silesia
List of multilateral treaties Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Poland (June 28, 1919), the so-called Little Treaty of Versailles; Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Czechoslovakia (September 10, 1919) Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes (September 10, 1919) Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Greece (August 10, 1920) Treaty between the Principal Allied and Associated Powers and Romania, signed at Paris on 9 December 1919 and went into effect on 16 July 1920. Ratified by the British government on 12 January 1921, by the Japanese government on 25 January 1921 and by the Italian government on 3 March 1921. Registered in League of Nations Treaty Series on 21 July 1921.League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. 5, pp. 336-353
System The Minority Treaties were the basis of the League's system of minorities. Their aim was to protect the minorities without alienating the majority of the countries' population. The procedure was centered on the Council of the League (rather than the more encompassing Assembly) which had the right and obligation to raise complaints of treaty violations. Individual Council members had the unique privilege of placing complaints on the agenda, even through the petitions for that could be sent from any source. The majority of cases, however, were never handled by the council. Before reaching the Council, the petition passed through: the minority section of the Secretariat which selected the petitions according to some criteria (prohibition of violent language, integrity of the state, complaints about specific violations...), tried a first mediation and asked for supplementary information; the special committee of three that was appointed by the council and had the faculty of:
dismissing the petition trying a second stage of mediation submitting the question to the Council, which had the opportunity to seek a final agreement between the partiesGiuseppe Motta, Less of Nations: Central-Eastern European Minorities After WW1, vol. 1; http://www.cambridgescholars.com/download/sample/59407 () If the accused government and the League could not reach a satisfactory compromise, the final decision was referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice (most cases were solved by negotiations between affected governments before the International Court intervention).Carole Fink, "The minorities question at the Paris Peace Conference", in The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment After 75 Years, Manfred Franz Boemeke, Gerald D. Feldman, Elisabeth Gläser (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1998, , Google Print - p. 249 onward
Importance The Minority Treaties, recognized as history's first minority treaties, were an important step in protection of minorities and recognition of human rights, bringing the subject to an international forum. In them, for the first time, states and international communities recognized that there are people living outside normal legal protection and who required an additional guarantee of their elementary rights from an external body, as protection within individual states itself may not be sufficient. Among issues successfully resolved by the Minority Treaties was the Åland crisis.