RIGHTS OF MINORITIES

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 57, Issue 249, 2 August 1937, Page 7

RIGHTS OF MINORITIES

APPEAL FOR RECOGNITION. CONGRESS IN LONDON. LONDON, July 10. “Forty milion Europeans demand the right to live.” “Every eighth European belongs to a national minority.” These legends were blazoned on the walls of the hall in Westminster in which the 13th Congress of European Minorities met. Forty-four delegates from 10 countries—Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Yugoslavia, Latvia, Austria, Poland, Rumania, Spain, and Czechoslovakia — spoke of the rights of minorities, and urged better treatment for them. Nobody came from Germany or Russia. Two Catalans and two Basques came from Spain. . An Estonian German spoke English, and an Estonian Russian, German. Both urged Britain and the Dominions to press the League of Nations to treat more seriously and -consistently its duties as guarantor of the rights of minorities, and not to be influenced by political considerations and tenderness for Governments which were members of the League. Werner Hasselblatt, a German Estonian, quoted a statement that the League encouraged the weak to hope, and left them in the lurch. If the rights of minorities continued to he disregarded, peace would be seriously imperilled, he said. No statesmen convinced of the necessity for reform of the League should overlook this. Professor von Balogh, a Hungarian member of the Rumanian Parliament, 'said the political treatment of minorities was a problem dangerous from the standpoint of peace.