A plan for changing the procedure in the treatment of national minorities’ questions by the League of Nations was submitted to the Secretariat General of the League through the Canadian representative at Geneva, by Senator Raoul Dandurand of Ottowa.
In a despatch from Geneva, the “New York Times” reports that the plan will be placed semi-officially before the League Council at its March 4 session, when the minorities’ question will be discussed. The plan consists of the following three points:
First, any petition the Secretariat received would be sent by the League to the government to which the minority belonged and if it did not settle the conflict in thirty days the question would be returned to the League, which would then alone be competent to solve it.
Second, the present system of having the Council name a temporary committee of three of its members to consider each petition would be changed in the sense that all nations who were members of the Council could participate and it be a permanent body.
Third, a written code on the conditions governing the acceptability of petitions by the League would be established to meet the charges that the present method deciding this point is largely arbitrary.
The first two points meet with little favor in the secretariat, the first on the ground that it would risk making solutions more difficult by placing in question the authority of the government complained of should the League have to take up a petition after delay and second on the ground that it would allow a government to participate in a League discussion on a petition of its minority.
Secretariat circles doubt whether the Council will approve of Senator Dandurand’s plan, and an effort will be made before the March session to modify it.
It has occasioned some surprise here that Senator Dandurand makes no provision for greater pulbicity for minority questions, the secrecy in which the petitions are now handled being one of the chief sources of complaint.
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