Minority Treaties

Minority Treaties refer to the treaties, League of Nations Mandates, and unilateral declarations made by countries applying for membership in the League of Nations and United Nations. Most of the treaties entered into force as a result of the Paris Peace Conference.

The treaties conferred basic rights on all the inhabitants of the country without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion and protected the rights of all nationals of the country who differed in race, religion, or language from the majority of the inhabitants of the country. 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, or United Nations.

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. 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:

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.

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. Clemenceau noted in an aide-memoire attached to the Polish treaty that the minority protections were consistent with diplomatic precedent:

This treaty does not constitute any fresh departure. It has for long been the established procedure of the public law of Europe that when a State is created, or when large accessions of territory are made to an established State, the joint and formal recognition of the Great Powers should be accompanied by the requirement that such States should, in the form of a binding International convention undertake to comply with certain principles of Government. In this regard I must recall for your consideration the fact that it is to the endeavors and sacrifices of the Powers in whose name I am addressing you that the Polish nation owes the recovery of its independence. It is by their decision that Polish sovereignty is being restored over the territories in question, and that the inhabitants of these territories are being incorporated into the Polish nation.... ...There rests, therefore, upon these Powers an obligation, which they cannot evade, to secure in the most permanent and solemn form guarantees for certain essential rights which will afford to the inhabitants the necessary protection, whatever changes may take place in the internal constitution of the Polish State.

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