Page:The Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic.pdf/20

 by the Supreme Administrative Court, a court which, in the technical sense, sees to the legality of the public administration when claims or complaints are advanced from any quarter. Our State is thus fitted out with all the attributes and means of a State based upon Right. That it is possible in certain cases to limit by an ordinary law the rights and liberties guaranteed by the Constitution or even, in circumstances of some extraordinary nature, to suspend these rights partially or completely, is nothing new. We meet with the same thing in other democratic republics.

Part VI of the Constitutional Charter deals with the protection of racial and religious minorities (section 2 of § 106 and § 122 of the Charter treat also of this matter). Our Constitution has adopted the stipulations of the Treaty of St. Germain relative hereto and has gone further than our international engagements require, in declaring §§ 131 and 132 of the Charter, as fundamental (constitutional) articles, though the Treaty of Saint Germain in no way requires this. Here again our State desired to give a proof of its good will to settle the rights of minorities with perfect equity. This was also the case with regard to the provisions in the Constitution as to the use of languages where our scrupulous desire to fulfil our international engagements went so far as to cause us to adopt the very terminology of the conclusion of art IV of the TrealyTreaty [sic] of St. Germain, the Czechoslovak language being designated as the state, official language (langue d'Etat, langue officielle).

It is clear to every unbiassedunbiased [sic] observer that the provisions of the Constitution relating to language are permeated both in letter and in spirit with the idea of perfect justice. The view that the Treaty of St. Germain prohibits the limitation of the language rights of minorities to a certain percentage of those minorities or to a certain area, is not supported by the Treaty of St. Germain itself (art. 7, sect IV). The Charter of the Constitution declares solemnly in its 134$th$ paragraph that every species of forcible denationalisation is strictly forbidden.

To sum up, it may be said that the definitive Constitution of the Czechoslovak Republic aims at being the democratic and just basis of public life in our State. It is a matter then, especially for our minorities, racial and religious, loyally to acknowledge these good traits and aims of our Constitution and to act accordingly.