THE VERSAILLES TREATY.

Waikato Times, Volume 96, Issue 15356, 3 October 1923, Page 4

THE VERSAILLES TREATY.

The Premier of Bavaria, at the recent Conference of Gorman Premiers, contended that France apd Belgium had broken the Treaty of Versailles, and therefore that document was not binding. upon Germany. It is interesting to remember that this point came up in the conversations between Mr Stanley Baldwin and M. Poincare. The former declared that the occupation of Ruhr was a contravention of the Treaty, while France maintains the contrary. Article 18 of Annex 11. ‘to Part VIII. gives her the right, (i) To occupy the Basin of the Ruhr, as a penalty for German reparation default; (it) To do so without the co-operation, sanction, or support of all tho-Allied and associated Powers; (3) to seize coal in the Ruhr, belonging to German nationals, on account of obligations undertaken by the German Government In the name of reparation; (4) to order Germans to furnish coal to them In direct opposition to the orders of their own (German) Government. Britain denies those claims severally and generally, but is willing that “this or any other difference respecting the legal interpretation of vital provisions of the Treaty!’ should be referred to the International Court of Justice at The Hague “or other suitable arbitration.” Now obviously (as a contemporary points out) the fact that eminent jurists on both sides support their Governments makes it presumptuous for laymen to do more than try to understand what the argument Is. This, however, they can do, and it is extremely important that they should do it. What, then, is the British case point by point?' With regard to the first claim of France mentioned above it is that there is no provision anywhere in the Treaty for the'occupation of the right bank of the Rhine. In certain contingencies the re-occupation of the left bank is provided for as a remedy for default, and this would seem a pointless proviso if there were authority somewhere else for invading any area of German territory that the Powers desired to invade. As some one put it the other day in the Law School of Sydney University, ‘“it is hardly credible that the framers of the Treaty would have buried the provisions for the occupation of the Ruhr in the obscurity of an Annex had they intended it to be the chief penalty for default.” But Britain is most emphatic in her denial of claim two—the right of France to act alone. If such a right exists, France has not always recognised it, since when Roumania made a plunge into independent action in 1919, M. Clemenceau sent her this interesting Note: “It is obvious that if the colllection of reparations were to be allowed to degenerate into individual and competitive action by the - several Allied and Associated Powers, injustice would be done and cupidity aroused, and, in the confusion of unco-ordinated action, the enemy would either evade, or be incapacitated from making, the maximum of reparation.” That, as Sir John Simon points out in a letter to The Times, suggests that the surprise expressed by France at the Baldwin Note is not quite sincere. And then there are the two specific claims that France may seize coal belonging to German nationals, and even oompei Germans to supply sucli -coal in direct opposition to thq orders of their own Government. In brief, it is a claim to do in peace what international law docs not sanction (without qualifications) in war. It is a principle of international law—certainly it is the spirit of sych law —that rights of control possessed by an invader end where duty to one’s country begins; or in other words, that no Government has the risht to make a member of another country a law-breaker. And in any case Britain argues—or they argue who support the Brilisli protest: eminent lawyers like Sir John Sirnon, for example—that the “other measures" of Paragraph 18 arc not, and cannot be, military measures, since military occupation is exhaustively dealt with in another part of the Treaty, and it would have been absurd to provide for the extent of military occupation in Article 430 if under another clause the right to occupation were unlimited.