Conference on collective and group cultural rights

The Impact of Collective Cultural Rights on General International Law – Relocating the Third-Generation Human Rights

24-25 June 2013, Warsaw

Symposium programme

In a little more than fifty years, the area of human rights has become one of the major concerns of international law and scholarship. Nonetheless, cultural rights are still considered the most neglected or least developed category of human rights in respect of their scope, legal content and enforceability. Though international instruments rarely define cultural rights as collective, it is generally understood that these rights comprise a group’s ability to preserve its way of life, such as child rearing, continuation of language, cultural self-determination as well as the access and enjoyment of its culture and cultural heritage. Indeed, the catalogue of cultural rights is exceptionally dynamic due to the fact that culture is a living and growing organism. However, the term ‘collective cultural rights’ cannot be easily perceived as self-explanatory. Some of these rights may consist in the right to protect a group’s cultural identity and its heritage by preventing an access by non-members thereof. Clearly, such rights may be in conflict with those collective rights that provide the right to information, knowledge and enjoyment of cultural heritage. In addition, it is often argued that collective cultural rights are not truly human rights since they are group-differentiated rather than universal to all people just by virtue of being human. And, their group-orientated scope may undermine the promotion and enforcement of basic individual rights and freedoms.

The symposium aims to explore the content and legal nature of collective cultural rights in the contemporary international legal framework. More precisely, it endeavours to discuss how the protection, recognition and enforcement of group cultural rights affect the development, changes and formation of general international law norms. To this aim, the symposium gathers both theoretical and doctrinal re-conceptualizations of collective cultural rights (in particular, the right to access, enjoyment and preservation of cultural heritage), and selected case-studies.

The symposium constitutes one of the major actions undertaken within a two-year research project on collective cultural rights financed by the Foundation for Polish Science and managed jointly by Dr Andrzej Jakubowski, Institute of Law Studies of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Prof. Ana Filipa Vrdoljak, Faculty of Law of the University of Technology Sydney and Dr Christophe Germann, Attorney at law (Geneva) and researcher, Faculty of Law, University of Berne.

The symposium will be held on 24-25 June 2013 at the Polish Academy of Sciences (Staszic Palace), Nowy Swiat 72, Warsaw (Poland). Its outcome will presented in a form of an edited volume published by an international publisher.