I agree.

I also find the idea wrong in principal. For while I think that attempts should be made to rectify ethnic cleansing in the immediate aftermath of such an event, doing so decades later is simply compounding one wrong with another.  There simply has to be a statute of limitations on such things.

Here I´m unsure...
So then when do you think those limitations you mention should start to work? What does "immediate" mean?
One year after the ethnic cleansing, five years or ten years later?
Just asking? And remembering Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Doesn´t that mean that if nobody - no important country in the world - is interested in "you", "you" are required to shut up once once your "limitation" is reached? So if a powerful nation "occupies" your territory for - say one generation - and expells "you", "you" should shut up once reaching the "limitation". Right?

So Tibet should be quiet. Same for the West Sahara. And East Timor never should have gained statehood either. You just have to expell more than 50% of the complaining people for - how long? - one generation and the "statute of limitations" is valid, right?

So the Russians did just make one mistake. They just didn´t send more than 50% of the Baltic population to Siberia when they could. With the result of losing the Baltic states in the 1990s. I´m sure future dictators will carefully view your "statutes of limitations". :)

In this my thinking has been perhaps influenced by my automatic association of a right of 'return' to the German expellee movement's notion of a Recht auf Heimat (or Heimatrecht) which is clearly associated with the strange idea that there is some mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory (Kulturlandschaft).

Get real!
Only a tiny minority of Germans would actually return to the birthplace of their great-parents. That said the Chech laws after 1945 didn´t distinguish between supporters of Hitler and people resisting him. So the laws might be a touch insensitive...

So you disagree with the Baltic states laws that if you want to be a citizen you have to speak the local language and be a local citizen?
I mean their law made some "mystical hereditary connection between a people/nation/race and territory".
Given your definition they don´t even have a right to exist?

The Baltic states only existed between 1920 and 1940?
Less than one generation. Before 1918 they were part of Russia. After 1945 they were part of the USSR.
So according to your definition they don´t have any right to exist? Your "statute of limitations" would have certainly expired for these states?