indigénat"; pertinenza; Heimatsrecht) is in the country at the date of the coming into force of the treaty, or when he was born in the territory of the country. The stipulations that applied to citizenship differed in the various treaties, but these two elements could be found in all of them. There are few exceptions to the first above-mentioned provision; one in Article 91 Paragraph 2 of the Versailles Peace Treaty, according to which German nationals or their descendants who became resident in Polish territory after January 1, 1908, will not acquire Polish nationality without a special authorisation from the Polish State. In several treaties a third ground was also included: persons who were born in the territory of the country from parents habitually resident there, but they did not live in the territory at the date of the coming into force of the treaty, could nevertheless acquire the citizenship of the given country.
3. The rights of ethnic, religious and minorities. These are: equality before the law, equal civil and political rights, as for instance admission to public employments; free use of the mother tongue in private and business life, religious activity, in the press or in publications of any kind, at public meetings or before the courts; equal rights to establish at their own expense charitable, religious and social institutions; in those towns and districts, where there is a considerable proportion ("proportion considérable") of Polish nationals belonging to racial, religious or linguistic minorities, their right for education in their mother tongue, and an equitable share from those sums that are allocated from public funds under the State, municipal or other budget for educational, religious or charitable purposes..
4. The legal character of the obligations enumerated above: According to Article 1, the state recognised these stipulations as fundamental laws that no law, regulation or official action should conflict or interfere with. According to the last article of the treaties, so far as the treaties affected persons belonging to racial, religious or linguistic minorities, they constituted obligations of international concern and were to be placed under the guarantee of the League of Nations. Any Member of the Council of the League of Nations had the right to bring to the attention of the Council any infraction, or any danger of infraction, of any of these obligations, and the Council could thereupon take such action and give such direction as it deemed proper and effective in the circumstances. In the case any difference of opinion as to questions of law or fact arising out of these Articles between the given Government and any one of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers or any other Power, a Member of the Council of the League of Nations, was to be held a dispute of an international character under Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations. The given Government consented that any such dispute should, if the other party thereto demanded, be referred to the Permanent Court of International Justice. The decision of the Permanent Court was to be considered final.
5. The last unit contains regulations that take special and local circumstances into consideration. For example, the Polish Treaty contained special stipulations with respect to Jews. The treaties signed with Yugoslavia and Greece contained stipulations on the protection of the Muslim minority. The Czech Treaty included the charter of the autonomy of the Ruthenians living in the southern parts of the Carpathians. Romania would guarantee autonomy to the Székely and Saxons in educational and religious matters; etc.
In the following I shall present the most important rules of substantive minority law on the basis of the Polish Treaty. I shall touch upon the articles of other treaties only in the case they depart from the Polish model.
In Article 1, Poland undertook that the stipulations contained in Articles 2 to 8 of this Chapter should be recognised as fundamental laws, and that no law, regulation or official action should conflic