International Protection of National Minorities Rights: Historical Aspect (Natalia Katko)

Раздел - "Международное право"The article examines the history of emergence of international regulation of national minorities status. The author considers that it is expedient to introduce the following period categorization: 1) the period before the establishment of the League of Nations; 2) the period of minorities protection within the League of Nations framework. The author believes that the study of international legal regulation of the national minorities status could help to avoid errors in developing universal international treaties aimed to regulate the minorities status in different states. On the basis of the research of the formation of the national minorities protection mechanism the author comes to the following conclusions. 1. Emergence of the legal norms providing minorities protection beginning with the XVI century testifies to the fact that even in those times the states already realized the importance of the of the solution of the given issue; however, minorities protection could not become a binding legal norm or principle (even for the states participating in the treaty) because of the uncorrelated interests of the states. 2. International recognition of the minorities rights created conditions for the interference into internal affairs of another state under the pretext of the minorities protection and could become an efficient instrument for pressure on the state policy. 3. Universal international practice of protection of both national and language minorities rights emerged on the basis of international protection of religious minorities rights which was conventionally fixed later, especially in the second part of the XIX century. 4. International treaty guarantees of the period under study did not bear collective character; despite the fact that several states could act as guarantors, the right to supervise observation of the obligation was given to only one of them as a rule. Due to this, international guarantees of minorities rights protection had a purely declarative nature. 5. The agreements on minorities lack the control mechanism, each state had a right to define independently the volume of their obligations and their interpretation; this leading to weakening or absence of the international guarantees on real minorities protection. There was no mechanism of legal pressure on violators of certain obligations in case a certain obligation relating to minorities was not observed or a certain state did not report the measures undertaken towards minorities according to the international obligations. 6. A minorities rights protection system set up in the framework of the League of Nations was qualitatively and significantly better compared to the previous period of international relations, however, the norms contained in the international treaties on minorities protection did not become universal though they laid down the foundations of the international legal norms regulating minorities status in international law. 7. International agreements on national minorities did not envisage national minorities rights protection as a community, but fixed the rights of separate individuals in connection with their ethnic origin, language or religion. Although the treaties declared the rights to cultural and social development of ethnic minorities, they did not provide for the possibility of creation and further development of a national state by a minority nor did they contain any criteria of classifying a certain individual as a minority member. Vague formulations in the agreements on minorities prove the fact that their creators had no clear principles or defined basis to build minorities protection upon, which eventually gave rise to many disputes in interpreting treatment of the agreement provisions and to possibilities for governments' abuse