"GERMAN
BELGIUM" as a model for Eastern Europe
EU "MINORITY
RIGHTS" LEGISLATION JUSTIFIES GERMAN INTERVENTION IN EASTERN COUNTRIES
APPLYING TO JOIN EU
Date of Report 19 July 2002
Translated on 30 July 2002
KOENIGSWINTER - The states of Eastern Europe should "in part take
the outstanding Belgian laws for the protection of minorities"
as a model. This was demanded at a conference of the "Cultural
Foundation of German Expellees" and the "Study Group for Policy
and International Law (Voelkerrecht) in Koenigswinter. The German-speaking
minority in Belgium uses its constitutionally guaranteed special rights
to fight for further far reaching autonomy. Even secession from the
Belgian State is no longer excluded from the debate.
Belgium was first constituted as a centralised, single language state
on the French model. The conference heard that since the Sixties Belgium
had changed into a "federal order which respects the rights of
its different communities". The Belgian laws for the protection
of minorities had given the German-speaking minority political scope,
which it is using to increase its autonomy. It was demanded at Koenigswinter
that these regulations must also be enacted in the EU accession states.
The European Framework Agreement on protection of minorities permitted
the German government to concern itself in the agreement's implementation
in the internal affairs of the applicant states.
The "Study Group for Policy and International Law", whose
material is published by the "Cultural Foundation of German Expellees"
was founded after the Second World War in the milieu of associations
of German "Expellees". It endeavours to create scientific
and academic legitimization of German demands for the former eastern
districts of the German Reich. In this connection, it specialist above
all in "Minorities rights and international law". Many prominent,
influential, German international lawyers belong to it. At the conferences
which it runs jointly with the Cultural Foundation of German Expellees,
foreign supporters of "people's group rights"
(Voelkergruppenrechte) regularly take part - among them members of the
Hungarian civil service or of the German-speaking minority in Poland.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
"VOLK" - literally translated as people or folk carries so
many more layers of meaning in German that there is no single English
equivalent. It comprises race, nation, community etc. The German word
for international law is "Voelkerrecht" - literally "law
of peoples"
Source: Specialist Conference on the State
and International Law by the
Cultural Foundation of German Expellees. Upper Silesia 2/2002
