Five of the Governments which have minorities have been active in interposing obstacles to any change in a procedure which they regard as already going too far in the direction of interference with their sovereignty and derogation from their national status, stated an editorial in the “Daily Telegraph” commenting on the decision of the Council of the League of Nations to postpone for its June session the question of changing the procedure for the submission of petitions by minorities against the governments of the countries where they reside.
The treatment of a delicate problem has once again been postponed by the adoption of an expedient with which all Governments are familiar, and with which the League has found it impossible to dispense.
No other result was expected from the raising of the question by the German and Canadian representatives in the present session of the Council, and no other result was conceivable, or even, perhaps, desirable, the “Telegraph declared.
The new committee is markedly different from the broad kind of Commission hoped for by Senator Dandurand, and departs still further from the ideal of van Bloeckland, who proposed a sort of permanent commission to watch over the interests of treaty-protected minorities, similar to the Mandates Commission, the “Manchester Guardian” wrote. It is hoped, however, that the new committee may give really earnest consideration to the proposals of Senator Dandurand and Herr Stresemann, and will be impressed rather more deeply with a sense of the sacredness of the League’s trusteeship towards the legal rights of minorities than with sympathy for the resistance of those Governments which dislike their treaty obligations or for the League’s embarrassment in seeing that these obligations are carried out.
No doubt the British Foreign Secretary did give a topsy-turvy picture of the minorities question tending rather to scold the minorities and to sympathize with the Governments that too often oppress them, the paper continued, and no doubt he did share the general opinion of League officialdom that the minorities are somewhat of a bore and a nuisance rather than a sacred charge. Yet with all these merits-merits from the Franco-Polish point of view-Sir Austen Chamberlain showed either a confused understanding of his brief, or certain inclinations are far from reassuring. He did not altogether approve the doctrine of assimilation of minorities, which, by the way, is contrary to the very spirit of the minorities treaties, but he did criticize certain defects of the existing procedure.
All the manoeuvres for packing the Council in recent years, the “Guardian” wrote in another editorial on the same question, have been designed to produce transient majorities. Of the Powers hostile to minorities reform, two, Poland and Roumania, are on the Council. They and the other three Czecho-Slovakia, Jugo-Slavia and Greece, are making a bid for the support of further members, especially France and Italy. The almost automatic solidarity of France with the Little Entente is well known. Italy has no particular concern for the proposed reforms, but is very much interested in alliances with Greece and Roumania.
It is therefore possible that these manoeuvres will create a transient majority on the League’s Council that will either prevent reform or pass reforms that can have no practical effect. Against this danger-and it is very real-Great Britain can make a stand. She can do much, perhaps all, to save the rights of the national minorities from being betrayed, the paper declared.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
