LR tarptautinių sutarčių, sudarytų 1918–1940 m., skelbimo problema

Abstract

The problem of the announcement of the international treaties of the Republic of Lithuania, concluded in 1918–1940, was not widely investigated up to now. The data of the international treaties of the mentioned period can be found in the official Lithuanian („Vyriausybės ţinios“, Reference books of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) and foreign (the Treaty Series issued by the League of Nations) sources of law, as well as in unofficial works issued by the individual authors (the Collections of Treaties „The Treaties with Foreign countries“ by P. Dailidė, etc.)
Carrying out a deeper analysis of these sources, it turned out that the data concerning the number of international treaties was not precise and exhaustive. Numerous part of the treaties have not been named at all in the official sources. Some facts have been clarified, carrying out an exhaustive research of the information provided by these sources, besides performing a search in the Central State Archive of Lithuania.
This work aims to analyse broadly the subjective and objective reasons having influenced the process of the announcement of the international treaties. During the research, it came up that due to the objective reasons (i.e. due to the soviet occupation the codification works of the treaties have not been finalised, also due to the existence of the secret treaties) all the treaties, concluded up to 15th June, 1940 might not be announced. Some treaties have not been announced also due to the existence of the subjective reasons (i.e. a low level of the development of the international law, in some cases – due to omissions of the personnel of MFA).
The following conclusions should be noted. Firstly, it is not possible to determine the exact number of the treaties concluded in 1918–1940 due to some reasons. None of the sources of law has an exhaustive list of the treaties; some of the treaties have not been mentioned in the official sources at all. Besides, not all the data provided in the sources is precise. Furthermore, the low level of the development of international law raises the problem of identification of the treaty itself. Some imperfections of the official sources have been eliminated with a help of an official publication issued League of Nation, some individual works of private lawyers. Some unknown texts of the treaties have been found, as well as the treaties, which have never been published, in official publications of Lithuania.
The major shortage of the information about the treaties is related to the period of the beginning of the statehood of Lithuania (1918–1919) and the period of the preface of the Second World War. The recent period was famous about conclusion of secret treaties. However, due to the Soviet occupation the codification works of the all treaties have not been finished. Some attempts to prepare the index of the treaties concluded after the year of 1939 and published in „Vyriausybės ţinios“ have been realised by the group of authors (V. Andriulis, R. Mockevičius, V. Valeckaitė) already nowadays.
Summarising all the research, it should be noted that the information about international treaties, being provided by official and unofficial sources, is not fairly exhaustive. According to my data, Lithuania has concluded over 340 international treaties (over 275 bilateral and over 65 multilateral treaties) in 1918-1940.