The Minorities Treaty

The members of the Council of Europe adopted the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities on 1 February 1995 after which they submitted it for signature and ratification to the Member States. This Framework Treaty, also called Convention, aims to reduce tensions between communities by defining a set of minimum rights in respect to the treatment of national minorities at economic, social, political and cultural level. The Member States, inter alia, should ensure that recognized minorities have access to the media, can receive education in their own language and can use their own language in their dealings with the government so that their culture and identity is preserved.

It was left to the Member States to interpret and implement this agreement and to define the notion of national minority. The Council of Europe thus left a margin for interpretation and the possibility of making reservations; a pragmatic approach was needed in order to have the convention adopted by as many Member States as possible while safeguarding the internal institutional agreements and balances. Several Member States, including Germany, Denmark and Switzerland, thus ratified the convention with reservations.

On 31 July 2001 the Belgian federal government signed the agreement as part of a wider community compromise (the Lambermont Agreement) with the following nuance: The Kingdom of Belgium declares that the application of the Framework Treaty does not affect the constitutional provisions, guarantees or principles nor the legislative and decretal norms that currently regulate language use. The Kingdom of Belgium declares that the notion of national minority will be defined by the Interministerial Conference for Foreign Policy.

This Interministerial Conference for Foreign Policy (ICFP) had to establish the rules for signature and determine the definition of 'national minority', but so far has not succeeded in doing so. Constitution specialists have also pointed out that the scope and the impact of the ratification of the Minority Treaty on the Belgian constitutional structure, language laws and community equilibriums in Belgium are unpredictable. The Minority Treaty, after all, is contrary to the principle of territoriality, one of the foundations of the subdivision in language areas and of language legislation in Belgium.

In view of the fact that the Framework Treaty is a mixed agreement, all federated Parliaments have to agree to its signature and ratification. On 24 July 1997 the Flemish Government declared that it would only sign the treaty subject to the reservation that neither the Dutch speakers nor the French speakers could be considered as a national minority in the light of the existing institutional equilibriums within the federal state and of language legislation. Both communities are dominant in their own language area and are minorities in the other area, but are co-dominant in the federal structures and in the bilingual Brussels-Capital Region.

In an additional resolution the Council of Europe in 2002 indicated, however, that the notion of national minority would also refer to regional minorities, i.e., to Dutch speakers in Wallonia and French speakers in Flanders. The last coalition agreement (2009) of the Flemish Government, as a result, comprises the explicit statement that it will not ratify the Framework Treaty. This reticence has nothing to do with the spirit of the treaty but rather with its potential impact on the community relations in the country. The current institutional structure and language legislation are the outcome of a historic compromise. Various mechanisms have already been incorporated in the Belgian state structure to protect minorities, including the special majorities, the alarm bell procedure and parity in the federal and Brussels governments. The fear remains, as indicated by constitutional experts, that a ratification without reservation or nuance could interfere with the existing complex and balanced equilibriums and agreements between the language communities.

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