CYIL vol. 9 (2018)

JÁN KLUČKA CYIL 9 ȍ2018Ȏ and obligations. At the same time, this provision reflected the post-war international decline from the concept of minority rights to general human rights. The 1960 socialist Constitution also declared the equality of ‘all citizens regardless of nationality and race’ (Article 20), and granted ‘citizens of Hungarian, Ukrainian and Polish nationality’ all prospects and means of cultural development and education in their mother tongue (Article 25). 61 Surprisingly, the 1968 Constitutional Act on Minorities Rights granted national minorities more rights than the previous socialist constitution. Constitutional law firstly declared the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic as the ‘shared state of the Czech and Slovak nations and the nationalities living on its territory’ (Article 1). Traditional minorities, i.e. Polish, Hungarian, Ukrainian, and German, were promised special rights in the use of their languages, establishment of minority schools, and promotion of their culture. The minorities got the right to proportional representation in all political bodies and the constitutional law also granted all citizens the right to decide their nationality on their own account, and the freedom from oppression on national grounds. 62 Twenty years after the first post-war Czechoslovak constitution, this constitutional law officially proclaimed minorities as a part of the Czechoslovak state and prohibited all forms of denationalization. At the beginning of the 1990s the federal Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms (hereinafter as the “Charter”) adopted in 1991 formed the last of the constitutional acts focused on minorities in the Czechoslovak Federal Republic before its dissolution in 1993. 63 The Charter granted fundamental rights to all ‘regardless of sex, race, colour, language, faith, religion, political affiliation or conviction, national or social origin, nationality or ethnic origin, property, birth or any other status’, including the right to decide your own nationality (articles 12 and 3, respectively). Discrimination on national grounds was prohibited, and national minorities were granted various cultural rights, including the right to education in the minority language, the right to use such language in official communication, and the right to participate in decisions affecting the national minorities and ethnic groups (Chapter 3 of the Charter). More than 70 years after its first Constitution (1920), the Czechoslovak Republic at the end of its existence adopted a special constitutional law devoted to the protection of minorities. However, it took it under different historical conditions as a member of the UN, while this act fully complied with the international regulations adopted under the auspices of the United Nations. The highest constitutional level of regulation confirms the importance that the Czechoslovak Federal Republic devoted to the guarantee of the proper exercising of the rights of persons belonging to minorities under its jurisdiction. This Constitutional Act still forms an integral part of the constitutional orders of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic. The constitutions of both republics deal with minorities rights as well. Very briefly, one may state that the Slovak Constitution differs from the Czech one in two crucial ways: First, it grants national and ethnic minorities ‘the right to learn the official language’ (that is Slovak, according to number of minorities compared to the multinational states they replaced, by 1945, however, ethnic homogeneity was the geostrategic concern. Ethnic homogeneity had become the sine qua non of political stability and nation- state viability in Eastern Europe, owing to the failure of the post-1919 settlement and the part the so-called minorities problem had played in its undoing.” In: REINISCH, J. and WHITE, E. (Eds.) The Disentanglement of Populations: Migration, Expulsion and

Displacement in post-war Europe, 1944-49 , 2011, p. 27. 61 Published under Act No. 100/1960 Collection of Laws. 62 Published under Act No. 144/1968 Collections of Laws. 63 Published under Act No. 23/1991 Collection of Law.

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