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CYIL 7 ȍ2016Ȏ LEGAL REGULATIONS FOR AND PRACTICES OF THE USE OFMINORITY LANGUAGES
lack of regulation requesting that officials who work in minority municipalities speak
the minority language).
The two contributions by Harald Ch. Scheu on South Tyrol (on the use of
minority languages before administrative authorities and courts and on topographical
signs) reveal how uneasy is to achieve a fair and workable solution. Lengthy adoption
of legal regulations, which started with the 1946 Treaty between Italy and Austria and
extended up to 1992 (use of languages) and 2012 (topographical names) respectively,
provides little encouragement for legislators, given that the South Tyrol case is often
presented as a model solution.
Articles by René Petráš (on the history of use of minority languages and
topographical designations in Czechoslovakia) and by Blanka Soukupová (on opinions
of Czechoslovak public on the 1920 Language Act) offer a pleasant surprise by their
unbiased view of Czech (Czechoslovak) history. Thus Petráš sees the endeavours of the
drafters of the 1920 Language Act to achieve a radical distance from the monarchy
(which also lead to the exclusion of Austrian emperors and their family members from
the potential list of toponymical names) critically. Soukupová leaves no doubt that
Czechs entered the new state with ideas of their own superiority. As a result, public
opinions on the 1920 Language Act remained deeply divided. Czechs saw it largely
as an incarnation of Czechoslovak tolerance, the Czech-German population rather as
a betrayal of democratic principles and means of oppression of non-Czech minorities.
The second part of the volume contains seven studies under the title
Legal status
of kin states within the system of the international protection of national minorities
. The
texts, read as a whole, point to a paradox. On the one hand, attempts of kin states
(for which the editors and some authors use the term mother states
2
) to influence the
situation of kin minorities living beyond their borders belong to the most dangerous
elements of international politics. As René Petráš and Veronika Bílková remind us in
their contributions, the outbreak of WWI and WWII, the Turkish intervention in
Cyprus in 1974 or the mentioned intervention of Russia in Ukraine in 2014 were
all linked to this phenomenon. On the other hand, the response of international law
to the reality of international politics, where old and new cross border ties between
kin states and kin communities are common (not excluding the Czech Republic, as
shown by Monika Forejtová on the case of Czech minority in Ukraine) is weak and
rather ambiguous.
One element explaining the paradox, namely the clash of the particularity of
special relations between a kin state and a kin minority with the universality of the
2
The kin state is generally understood as a state whose dominant ethnic population (kin majority) has
identified itself with a co-ethnic community (kin minority) living beyond its borders. The term kin state
and kin minority are used by the Council of Europe. They were introduced by the Venice Commission
in 2001. In Czech the terms used by different authors vary. They include inter alia „spřízněný stát“
a „spřízněná menšina“, „mateřský stat“ a „příbuzná menšina“.