File 868/1912 Pt 2 'Arms traffic: arrangements at Muscat for its regulation' [‎126r] (256/440)

grant their flag to native vessels has been limited for the purpose of suppressing slave
trading and in the general interests of humanity, irrespective of whether the applicant
for the flag may belong to a State signatory of this Act or not, and whereas at any
rate Prance is in relation to Great Britain hound to grant her flag only under the
conditions prescribed by this Act>;
Whereas, in order to attain the above-mentioned purpose, the Signatory Powers
ohAhe Brussels Act have agreed in its Article XXXII that the authority to fly the
flPlfg of one of the Signatory Powers shall in future only be granted to such native
vessels which shall satisfy all the three following conditions :—
1. Their fitters-out or owners must be either subjects of or persons protected by
the Power whose flag they claim to fly ;
2. They must furnish proof that they possess real estate situated in the district
of the authority to whom their application is addressed, or supply a solvent security
as a guarantee for any fines to which they may eventually become liable ;
3. Such fitters-out or owners, as well as the captain of the vessel, must furnish
proof that they enjoy a good reputation, and especially that they have never been
condemned for acts of Slave Trade;
Whereas, in default of a definition of the term “ protege ” in the General Act of
the Brussels Conference this term must be understood in the sense which corresponds
best as well to the elevated aims of the Conference and its Pinal Act as to the
principles of the law of nations as they have been expressed in Treaties existing at
that time in internationally recognized legislation and in international practice;
Whereas the aim of the said Article XXXII is to admit to navigation in the seas
infested by Slave Trade only those native vessels which are under the strictest
surveillance of the Signatory Powers, a condition which can only be secured if the
owners, fitters-out, and crews of such vessels are exclusively subjected to the
sovereignty and jurisdiction of the State under whose flag they are sailing;
Whereas since the restriction which the term “ protege ” underwent in virtue of
the legislation of the Ottoman Porte of 1863, 1865, and 1869, especially of the
Ottoman Law r of 23 Sefer, 1280 (August 1863), implicitly accepted by the Powers
who enjoy the rights of capitulations, and since the Treaty concluded between Prance
and Morocco in 1863, to which a great number of other Powers have acceded, and
which received the sanction of the Convention of Madrid of the 30th July, 1880, the
term “ protege ” embraces in relation to States of capitulations only the following
classes : (1) persons being subjects of a country which is under the protectorate of
the Power wdiose protection they claim ; (2) individuals corresponding to the classes
enumerated in the Treaties with Morocco of 1863 and 1880 and in the Ottoman Law
of 1863; (3) persons who, under a special Treaty, have been recognized as “ proteges ”
like those enumerated by Article IV of the Prench-Muscat Convention of 1841; and
(1) those individuals who can establish that they had been considered and treated as
“ proteges ” by the Power in question before the year in which the creation of new
“ proteges ” was regulated and limited, that is to say, before the year 1863, these
individuals not having lost the status they had once legitimately acquired;
Whereas that, although the Powers have expressis verbis resigned the exercise of
the pretended right to create “proteges” in unlimited number only in relation to
Turkey and Morocco, nevertheless the exercise of this pretended right has been
abandoned also in relation to other Oriental States, analogy having always been
recognized as a means to complete the very deficient written regulations of the
capitulations as far as circumstances are analogous ; ., , , T
Whereas, on the other hand, the concession de facto made by lurkey that tlie
status of “proteges” be transmitted to the descendants of persons who in 1863 had
enjoyed the protection of a Christian Power, cannot be extended by analogy to
Muscat where the circumstances are entirely dissimilar, the “proteges °i the
Christian Powers in Turkey being of race, nationality, and religion different from their
Ottoman Rulers, whilst the inhabitants of Sur and other Muscat people who might
apply for Prench flags are in all these respects entirely in the same condition as the
other subjects of the Sultan of Muscat; „ _. 0/< .
Whereas the dispositions of Article IV of the Prench-Muscat Ireaty of 1844
armly only to persons who are bond fide in the service of Prench subjects, but not to
persons who ask for ships’ papers for the purpose of doing any commercial business;
P Whereas the fact of having granted before the ratification of the Brussels Act on
the 2nd January, 1892, authorizations to fly the Prench flag to native
[1008]
vessels not
C