A/HRC/58/60 70. Many current storage solutions, including cloud-based systems, often lack the stability and reliability necessary for sustainable archiving. Too often, archives are at risk of disappearing owing to lack of prioritization and inadequate long-term investment, including for maintenance and data storage. Long-term data storage is not only expensive but also resource intensive, with significant environmental impacts. These high costs of digital conservation and the limited research on its economic and cultural benefits make it difficult for institutions to justify investments in digitization projects. Governments and cultural institutions must invest in robust, long-term preservation strategies that address digital storage challenges, ensuring that cultural heritage is not lost due to technological advancements. Collaborative efforts underscore the need for comprehensive strategies to preserve at-risk archives and ensure their future availability for research and education. 71. Platforms such as Global Digital Heritage exemplify how cooperative efforts can create sustainable and accessible digital archives. Community-based initiatives provide for a complementary approach to sustainability by focusing on localized, smaller-scale archives that prioritize the involvement of local actors in digitization projects. These efforts foster capacity-building, empowering communities to take ownership of their digital heritage while promoting global access, and align with international frameworks such as the recommendations included in the evaluation of UNESCO standard-setting work related to the Hague Convention of 1954 and its two Protocols,83 as well as the 2015 Recommendation concerning the Protection and Promotion of Museums and Collections, their Diversity and their Role in Society. 72. Long-term preservation strategies must ensure that the same human rights principles continue to be applied over a long period of time, preserving respect for the source and heritage communities and for their decision-making role in defining practices governing access to and the use, sharing and transformation of the heritage assets and the related digital data set, and ensuring the right to gain access to and enjoy heritage for educational, research and preservation purposes, regardless of the ownership of the data. V. Conclusions and recommendations 73. Digitalization presents significant opportunities to preserve, document and share cultural heritage, offering innovative ways to celebrate cultural diversity and engage rights holders in heritage efforts. By adopting an inclusive and human rights-based approach, digitalization ensures that cultural heritage remains relevant, accessible and dynamic, thereby contributing to the full enjoyment of cultural rights for all. 74. Notwithstanding its benefits, if adopted uncritically and without safeguards, digitalization poses significant challenges to cultural rights. Questions must be asked about who holds the decision-making power to decide on digitalization, who has a seat at the table, how digitalization will enhance people’s rights and how their interests, views and priorities will be reflected in digitalization projects. 75. Digitalization should never be seen as an alternative to protecting, gaining access to and returning cultural heritage. The digitalized form can never reach the transformational effect of physical access to cultural heritage. 76. A cultural rights approach to digitalization entails ensuring that, at every step, the principles of the universality and indivisibility of rights, non-discrimination, equality, participation and respect for cultural diversity must be considered and applied. To ensure that cultural rights are respected, the minimum standards that must be infused in all aspects of digitalization include recognition of the source community; non-discrimination in selecting, identifying and protecting cultural heritage; equitable benefits; the real and meaningful participation of source or guardian communities to ensure that digitalization protects cultural heritage as a dynamic element of collective identity and memory; respect for cultural diversity in protecting and preserving cultural heritage; and, finally, revisability and accountability. 83 18 See UNESCO document C54/19/13.HCP/6. GE.25-01705