Introduction
More than a century after its signature on 24 July 1923, the Treaty of Lausanne remains the founding pillar of the legal and territorial order of the Republic of Turkey. Nevertheless, Section III of the Treaty, entitled "Protection of Minorities", is today the subject of lively doctrinal debates and reinterpretations advanced by certain political and intellectual circles. These contemporary readings, seizing upon certain provisions in isolation from the text, frequently attempt an extension of linguistic and cultural rights to Muslim communities such as the Kurds, Arabs or Circassians.
This approach, however, collides with an inescapable legal and historical reality. During the negotiations of 1922-1923, the Turkish delegation led by İsmet İnönü categorically rejected the model of the European minority treaties based on race or language, defending instead the uniform application of Sharia to all believers and the concept of the unity of the Ummah. As a result, the Allied Powers formally renounced the inclusion of Muslim minorities within the scope of international protection, as the conference archives demonstrate beyond dispute[1].
Accordingly, to what extent do the analysis of the travaux préparatoires and the textual architecture of the treaty — in particular the principle of religious reciprocity — make it possible to establish the legal truth of Section III in the face of today's anachronistic interpretations?
In order to answer this question, this study will first set out the universal (all-encompassing) and strictly territorial guarantee, distinct from the remainder of the text, contained solely in the first paragraph of Article 38 (I). It will then analyse, in a second part, the strictly religious (confessional) character of Articles 39 to 44, whose application is confined exclusively to non-Muslim minorities (II). Finally, it will show how the rule of complete reciprocity laid down in Article 45 definitively confirms the specifically religious scope intended by the negotiators at Lausanne (III).
Part I — The Universal and Territorial Scope of Article 38, Paragraph 1: A General Human Rights Clause
A. A Major Semantic Rupture: From the Concept of "Minority" to that of "Inhabitant"
In order to grasp the specificity of Article 38, paragraph 1, of the Treaty of Lausanne, one must analyse with rigour the linguistic formulation of the official text. The text reads as follows:
"The Turkish Government undertakes to assure full and complete protection of life and liberty to all inhabitants of Turkey without distinction of birth, nationality, language, race or religion…"
The choice of the word "inhabitants" (habitants) is of vital legal significance. Unlike the subsequent provisions, which restrict the field of application of Section III to "non-Muslim minorities" or to "Turkish nationals", Article 38, paragraph 1, is stripped of any national, ethnic or religious criterion. In public international law, the term "inhabitant" denotes a purely territorial jurisdiction. This article creates no group status; it imposes upon the Turkish State a general obligation of public order owed to every natural person present on its territory.
B. Confirmation by the Minutes: The Exclusion of Collective Rights for Muslims
An examination of the travaux préparatoires of the Lausanne Conference confirms this narrow interpretation. During the deliberations of the Commission on Territorial and Minority Questions, the Allied delegates (the British in particular) expressly raised the situation of the non-Turkish Muslim populations, such as the Arabs, Kurds and Circassians. Following the categorical refusal of the Ankara negotiating delegation — which regarded the grant of minority status to these groups as a threat of interference and partition — a compromise of a purely individual character was reached.
The minutes show that Turkey accepted Article 38, paragraph 1, precisely because it conferred no collective, cultural or linguistic right upon Muslim minorities. The Turkish delegation regarded these populations as integral parts of the Ummah, governed uniformly under Islamic law. By agreeing to protect the "life" and "liberty" of all inhabitants, Turkey was not recognising minority privileges or rights for the Kurds or the Arabs; it was merely undertaking to observe elementary standards of the law of nations, applied without distinction to Muslims (whether Turkish or not), non-Muslims and foreigners alike.
Part II — The Strictly Religious/Confessional Character of Articles 39 to 44: The Exclusion of Muslim Linguistic and Ethnic Minorities
In order to grasp the true scope of Article 39, the meaning of the expression "Turkish nationals" must first be clarified. From a strictly legal standpoint, the term "national" denotes the bond of allegiance and citizenship linking an individual to a sovereign State. In the context of 1923, this purely technical formula served to encompass the entire population passing under the sovereignty of the new Ankara State, without distinction of race or religion. The use of this universal term, however, gives rise today to a semantic confusion: a literal reading, divorcing the text from its historical context, tends to extend the provisions of Article 39 to all citizens of the Republic. Yet the analysis of the travaux préparatoires makes plain that, although the wording formally refers to every "Turkish national", the intention of the drafters was to confine the practical application of these special guarantees exclusively to nationals belonging to the non-Muslim minorities.
A. The Impermeability of the Religious Criterion in the Structural Design of Section III
Whereas Article 38, paragraph 1, lays down a foundation of general scope, the subsequent articles (39 to 44) immediately reduce the legal framework to a single criterion: non-Muslim religion. Article 39, paragraph 1, lays the cornerstone by providing that "Turkish nationals belonging to non-Muslim minorities shall enjoy the same civil and political rights as Muslims".
This textual formulation creates a binary and entirely closed line of division. On one side stand the "Muslims" — regarded by the Ankara negotiators as a homogeneous national and religious bloc — and on the other the "non-Muslim minorities". Consequently, any attempt to isolate paragraphs 4 and 5 of Article 39 (concerning the free use of "any language") so as to extend them to the languages spoken by the Muslim population (Kurdish, Arabic or Circassian) constitutes a systemic error of interpretation. Under the proper method of treaty interpretation, these paragraphs cannot be read independently of the first paragraph, which restricts the subject-matter exclusively to non-Muslims.
B. The Turkish Doctrinal Foundation in 1923: The Ummah and the Indivisibility of the Believers
The travaux préparatoires of the Lausanne Conference illuminate the foundation of this theologico-legal construction. In the sessions of the Commission on Minorities, the Turkish delegation, led by Rıza Nur, opposed a systematic refusal to the Allies' attempts to introduce protection for minorities of "race" or "language". For Ankara, the very concept of a "Muslim minority" constituted a legal contradiction in terms under the public law then in force.
The Turkish jurists and diplomats at Lausanne recalled that the Kurds, Arabs and Circassians shared the same Islamic faith as the Turks and were therefore fully integrated within the Ummah. In the Ottoman Empire, the Millet system granted autonomy and a separate status only to the non-Muslim religious communities (Greek, Armenian, Jewish). Perpetuating this logic at Lausanne, Turkey placed on record that Sharia and the general law applied uniformly to all Muslims without distinction of ethnic origin. The Allies yielded entirely on this point, abandoning the idea of protecting the cultural or linguistic particularities of non-Turkish Muslims. Thus the expression "a language other than Turkish" in Article 39, paragraph 5, referred, according to the common intention of the parties, solely to the languages of the recognised religious minorities.
Indeed, the Allied draft (of Article 39, paragraph 5) had provided for the right to express oneself before the courts both in writing and orally. Following the objection of the Turkish negotiators to the written form, and after Venizelos declared that he could not object, observing that written proceedings conducted in numerous languages before the courts would operate as an obstacle to the administration of justice, Montagna, the chairman of the sub-commission, stated "the article is adopted" and passed to the next article.
Part III — Article 45 and the Principle of Complete Reciprocity: The Registration of a Bilateral Religious Scope
A. The Legal Mirror Mechanism Between Turkey and Greece
Article 45 constitutes the closing provision of Section III and supplies its final key of interpretation. The text expressly provides:
"The rights conferred by the provisions of the present Section on the non-Muslim minorities of Turkey will be similarly conferred by Greece on the Muslim minority in her territory."
From the standpoint of public international law, this provision establishes a mutual and bilateral (synallagmatic) mechanism of reciprocity. Article 45 conceives the protection of minorities not as an abstract and universal corpus of human rights, but as a meticulous legal equilibrium between two sovereign States. The treaty creates a perfect parallelism of form: the fate of the non-Muslims of Turkey (essentially the Greeks of Istanbul) is structurally and legally bound to that of the Muslims of Greece (the Muslims of Western Thrace).
B. The Irrefutable Proof of the Exclusion of the Muslims of Turkey
The inclusion of Article 45 by the negotiators at Lausanne constitutes the irrefutable textual proof that the Muslim minorities of Turkey (Kurds, Arabs, Circassians) were entirely excluded from the field of application of Section III. Had the intention of the parties been to bring non-Turkish Muslims within the scope of Articles 37 to 44, the reciprocity mechanism of Article 45 would have produced a wholly unworkable and unbalanced legal situation. Greece would have been bound to grant rights only to the Muslim minority on its own territory, whereas Turkey would have had to secure those same rights to millions of its own citizens of the Muslim faith.
The travaux préparatoires confirm that the diplomats designed Article 45 as a mirror arrangement resting solely on the religious criterion. By binding the status of the non-Muslims of Turkey to that of the Muslims of Greece, the signatory parties definitively endorsed the thesis of the Turkish delegation: in Turkey there exists, in law, only a single global Muslim community standing opposite specific religious minorities. Consequently, contemporary readings that seek to integrate Muslim linguistic or ethnic claims into the body of the Treaty of Lausanne disregard the principle of religious symmetry upon which the treaty rests, and thereby distort the general architecture of the compromise of 1923.
Conclusion
In sum, an objective and textual examination of Section III of the Treaty of Lausanne makes it possible to restore the historical truth in the face of doctrinal anachronisms. With the exception of Article 38, paragraph 1 — conceived as a minimal territorial guarantee of life and liberty for every human being — the treaty of 1923 is an instrument of strictly religious (confessional) character. Relying on the concept of the Ummah, and locking the text by means of the reciprocity rule of Article 45, the negotiators deliberately exempted the Muslim minorities from the benefit of these articles. To claim the contrary today amounts to nothing more than a decontextualized reading, severed from the true intention of the parties at the time of the treaty's signature.
[1] This study rests directly upon the examination and survey of the minutes of the fourteen official sessions held during the Lausanne Conference (1922-1923) by the Sub-Commission on Minorities established within the Commission on Territorial and Minority Questions.
Şeyhmus Özdemir — Bachelor of Swiss Law (Licencié en droit suisse)
Lausanne, 24 July 2026