Paris Peace Treaties, 1947

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Paris Peace Treaties, 1947

Canadian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, Palais du Luxembourg. Left to right: Norman Robertson, William Lyon Mackenzie King, Brooke Claxton, Arnold Heeney
Type	Multilateral treaties
Signed	10 February 1947 (1947-02-10)
Location	Paris, France
Effective	15 September 1947 (1947-09-15)
Parties	United Kingdom  Soviet Union  United States  France "Party to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Japan"[1]  Italy "Ally of Hitlerite Germany"[2]  Romania  Hungary  Bulgaria  Finland
Ratifiers	All signatories

The Paris Peace Treaties (French: Traités de Paris) were signed on 10 February 1947 following the end of World War II in 1945. The Paris Peace Conference lasted from 29 July until 15 October 1946. The victorious wartime Allied powers (principally the United Kingdom, Soviet Union, United States, and France) negotiated the details of peace treaties with those former Axis allies, namely Italy, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Finland, which had switched sides and declared war on Germany during the war. They were allowed to fully resume their responsibilities as sovereign states in international affairs and to qualify for membership in the United Nations.^{[note 1]} Nevertheless, the Paris Peace Treaties avoided taking into consideration the consequences of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, officially known as the Treaty of Non-Aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, whose secret clauses included the division of Poland between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the occupation of the Baltic States, and the annexation of parts of Finland and Romania. The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact changed the borders agreed after the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), and was signed on August 23, 1939. One week later, World War II started with Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland, followed three weeks later by the Soviet invasion of Poland, which was completely erased from the map. In the following years, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union changed the borders established by the peace treaties at the end of World War I.

The settlement elaborated in the peace treaties included payment of war reparations, commitment to minority rights, and territorial adjustments including the end of the Italian colonial empire in North Africa, East Africa, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Albania, as well as changes to the Italian–Yugoslav, Hungarian–Czechoslovak, Soviet–Romanian, Hungarian–Romanian, French–Italian, and Soviet–Finnish borders. The treaties also obliged the various states to hand over accused war criminals to the Allied powers for war crimes trials.^[3]

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