Located in the crossroad between Europe and Asia, the territory of today's
Thus the national minorities in
The second part of the Treaty of Lausanne is about the protection of the minority right in
According to Article 39, alongside with the official language, which is Turkish, languages of national minorities are also allowed to be used. "No restrictions shall be imposed on the free use by any Turkish national of any language".
According to Article 40 non-Muslim minorities have equal rights to establish and manage charitable, religious, social institutions, schools, other institutions for instruction and education at their own expanse, with the right to use their own language and the exercise their own religion in these institutions.
According to Article 42 the Turkish Government will undertake the full protection of churches, synagogues, cemeteries and other religious institutions of the minorities.
The aforementioned Articles of the Treaty of Lausanne on legal guarantees of the minority rights refers only to the non-Muslim minorities (the treaty of
After signing the Treaty of Lausanne, the Turkish authorities drastically changed their policies towards national minorities. The policies towards the Kurds changed, too. Moreover, the Turks very soon declared that there are no national minorities in
It is worth mentioning that this point is also included in the current Constitution of Turkey. The Article 88 of 1924 Constitution has become Article 66 of 1982 Constitution. Consequently, there is no reference to the national minorities in the Turkish Constitution. The Turkish statistics tried to present the countries population as much homogeneous as possible by reducing the number of national minorities.
With the adoption of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the process of adoption of numerous international documents began. Turkey has joined many international agreements on human rights protection, but many of them have been ratified with special reservations, because of minority rights issues (for example, Turkey signed the 1965 Convention on "The Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination" in 1972 and ratified in 2002, but still it has not recognized the eligibility of the Committee for Combating Discrimination to receive individual applications).
At the same time