Depriving Small Ethnic Minorities of Legal Existence? The Supreme Court on Ethnicity in 1920s Estonia
Depriving Small Ethnic Minorities of Legal Existence? The Supreme Court on Ethnicity in 1920s Estonia

Summary/Abstract: This article discusses the issue of legal existence of ethnic minorities by asking whether and how legal recognition of ethnic groups as collective entities has affected individual freedom of ethnic self-identification. To this end, the article analyses court cases concerning the ethnicity record in identity documents in 1920s Estonia. It appears that the court decisions, all of which covered the right of individuals to select the ethnicity record “German”, as a side effect of relying on the Cultural Autonomy Law, explicitly declared small and marginal ethnic groups that did not meet the requirements of the law to be legally non-existent and prohibited the individual freedom to self-identify with these ethnic groups. However, these decisions appeared to have no significant impact on the individual freedom of choice. The results of the article thus show that the link between legal recognition of ethnic minorities as collective entities and individual freedom of ethnic self-identification is not unambiguous. Whether and to what extent restrictions on the freedom of choice were implemented in practice may have been dependent on such social conditions that are not immediately apparent from legal norms.

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