The Polish-Lithuanian Treaty on Neighbourly Relations of 1994 and the Polish-Russian Treaty on Neighbourly Relations of
On the basis of theoretical considerations concerning the scope and character of regulations of the rights of national minorities in international law and the historical and ethno-political conditions in Poland, Lithuania and the Russian Federation, the a
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The Polish-Lithuanian Treaty on Neighbourly Relations of 1994 and the Polish-Russian Treaty on Neighbourly Relations of 1992 in the Context of International Protection of the Rights of National Minorities Andrzej Wierzbicki
Introduction A comparative analysis of the treaties on neighbourly relations concluded in the early 1990s by the Republic of Poland with the Republic of Lithuania and with the Russian Federation (the Treaty between the Republic of Poland and the Republic of Lithuania on Friendly Relations and Neighbourly Cooperation, drawn up in Vilnius on 26 April 1994, and the Treaty Between the Republic of Poland and the Russian Federation on English translation by Anthony Sloan. A. Wierzbicki (*) Faculty of Political Science and International Studies, Institute of Political Science, University of Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2019 K. P. Marczuk (ed.), Good Neighbourhood Treaties of Poland, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12615-5_12
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Friendly, Neighbourly Cooperation, drawn up in Moscow on 22 May 1992) in respect of the rights of national minorities requires some introductory remarks. Firstly, modern standards of international law concerning the protection of members of national minorities embrace universal human rights and regulations pertaining directly to those rights associated with belonging to a national minority. A special type of relationship is formed between members of national minorities and the dominant majority, because the essence of belonging to a national minority is not only that it is a numerical (demographic) minority, but also that it lies outside the dominant political and cultural sphere, and that it seeks to preserve its ethno-cultural distinctiveness. The essence of the protection of minority rights is therefore, as Sławomir Łodziński writes, to ensure that those minorities can preserve their own identity and have equal opportunity to take part in public and cultural life along with the majority (Łodziński, 2002, p. 6). Yet it must be remembered that, even in the most democratic state, minorities do not enjoy full linguistic or cultural equality, as results from the very fact of being a minority. For this reason, the goal of all regulations concerning national minorities is to strive to equalise the conditions for preserving and developing the identity of the members of such minorities through ‘positive discrimination’ (Jackson Preece, 2007, pp. 97–98; Martin, 2001, pp. 9–20) and to create appropriate mechanisms and institutions to prevent ethnocratic tendencies on the part of the majority or undue politicisation of the ethnicity of minorities (Tishkov & Shabaev, 2011, pp. 163–164). A second issue is the recognition of collective minority rights. Many countries are not very enthusiastic about recognising such rights for fear of secession, separatism or autonomisation. It is for this reason that international documents and the laws of particular countries contain a compromise formula on the exercise of guaranteed ri
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