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Would Put Teeth in Minorities Pacts, Extend Them to All Nations

November 22, 1939
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Extension of minorities treaties to all countries, with transfers of populations in a few cases where practicable, is set forth as one of the peace aims of the British League of Nations Union by Dr. Gilbert Murray, chairman, writing in the union’s organ, Headway.

“No redivision of European frontiers can avoid leaving alien minorities inside certain countries,” Dr. Murray states. “The only true solution would be one which would make frontiers in Europe matter as little as those between France and Belgium, or the U.S.A. and Canada. Short of that, the protection afforded by the existing minorities treaties should be extended to all countries and made genuinely effective. In a few cases transfer of populations may be practicable.”

Lord Cecil, former president of the union and holder of the Nobel Peace Prize, in a message covering the publication’s front page, pleads for “a peace based on the equal rights of all peoples; on the sanctity of international treaties…unity of mankind not only in matters of trade and commerce, but still more in those conceptions of moral and intellectual progress which are embodied, however imperfectly, in the great structure of Christian civilization.”

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