751.90D/73
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Chief of the Division of Near Eastern Affairs (Murray)
During a call from the French Ambassador on July 23 I inquired whether he had any information as to whether the French Parliament contemplated ratifying at an early date the Franco-Syrian Treaty of 1936 looking to the termination of the French Mandate over Syria. The Ambassador said he had received no information on the subject nor was he informed of the course of the conversations that had taken place between our Embassy in Paris and the French Foreign Office regarding proposed tripartite treaties between the United States, France and Syria and the United States, France and the Lebanon, in which reference would be made to the various treaties to be negotiated by this Government with those states under French Mandate prior to the termination of their mandatory status and which would also contain a clause releasing France from the obligations she assumed in her Treaty of 1924 with the United States, in which this Government assented, under certain conditions, to the exercise of a French Mandate over Syria and the Lebanon.
I reminded the Ambassador that the Franco-Syrian and the Franco-Lebanese Treaties of 1936 did not cover satisfactorily the judicial arrangements that would have to be made with the mandated states prior to the termination of the mandates, and I referred in this connection to the very detailed judicial agreement that had been negotiated between Great Britain and Iraq29 some years before the termination of the Iraq Mandate. The Ambassador replied that he was responsible for the absence from the above-mentioned treaties of 1936 of any judicial agreements since he thought it preferable to await the outcome of the Montreux Conference for the termination of [Page 1026] the capitulations in Egypt, which took place in May, 1937.30 In this connection he expressed his very keen disappointment over the failure of the American delegate at the Conference, Mr. Fish, to support the French viewpoint regarding the status of the Egyptian Mixed Courts after the termination of the capitulations. It will be recalled that the French delegation at the Montreux Conference proposed that for a period of six years after the termination of the capitulations there should be no modification in the proportion of foreign judges on the Tribunals of First Instance. In the absence of any support from the other delegations for their position, the French delegation was in the end obliged to yield to the Egyptian demands that any vacancies among foreign judgeships on the Courts of First Instance would be filled forthwith by Egyptian judges. The Ambassador felt that the outcome of the Montreux Conference, particularly with respect to the future status of the Mixed Courts of Egypt, would make France’s position in Syria more difficult when the time came to work out a new judicial agreement. He observed also that, while the Anglo-Iraqi judicial agreement of 1931 served the British needs in Iraq very well, such an agreement for Syria where the foreign judges sit in panels would not be adequate for the needs of the situation.
- Signed at Baghdad, March 4, 1931, League of Nations Treaty Series, vol. cxxiii, p. 77.↩
- For correspondence relating to this conference, see Foreign Relations, 1937, vol. ii, pp. 615 ff.↩