A/HRC/40/53 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Each report highlights the relevant conceptual and international human rights legal framework, notes examples of good practice and addresses significant challenges. The thematic work has contributed to clarifying the scope of cultural rights and their specificity in the universal human rights system and to a better understanding of the indivisibility and interdependence of cultural rights with other human rights. Mapping cultural rights 13. The position of cultural rights within the international human rights framework was underscored in the first thematic reports of each mandate holder (A/HRC/14/36 and A/HRC/31/59), issued in 2010 and 2016 respectively. In the first report in 2010, the first mandate holder emphasized that cultural rights covered a broad range of issues, such as expression and creation, including diverse forms of art; language; identity and belonging to multiple, diverse and changing groups; development of specific world visions and the pursuit of specific ways of life; education and training; access, and contribution to and participation in cultural life; and the conduct of cultural practices and access to cultural heritage (para. 9). In later reports, she added concerns regarding scientific freedom. The array of relevant instruments guaranteeing cultural rights at that time was also discussed in the first report, ranging from the main instruments of the International Bill of Human Rights to more recent treaties such as the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (paras. 11–20). 14. The status of cultural rights as an integral part of international human rights law was also recalled in the first thematic report of the second mandate holder (A/HRC/31/59, paras. 3–6 and 21–22). In each successive thematic report, she has further elaborated on the relevant international, regional and national legal standards, and emerging ones, so as to interpret and catalogue the jurisprudence of cultural rights, and has emphasized the strong legal grounding of those rights (see, in particular, A/HRC/31/59, paras. 21–22 and 52–65). 15. In her first report to the General Assembly, the first mandate holder established a working definition of cultural rights, clarifying their scope (A/67/287, para. 7). Those rights protect in particular: (a) human creativity in all its diversity and the conditions for it to be exercised, developed and made accessible; (b) the free choice, expression and development of identities, which include the right to choose not to be a part of particular collectives, as well as the right to exit a collective, and to take part on an equal basis in the process of defining it; (c) the rights of individuals and groups to participate, or not to participate, in the cultural life of their choice and to conduct their own cultural practices; (d) the right to interact and exchange, regardless of group affiliation and of frontiers; (e) the rights to enjoy and have access to the arts, to knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and to an individual’s own cultural heritage, as well as that of others; and (f) the rights to participate in the interpretation, elaboration and development of cultural heritage and in the reformulation of cultural identities (A/HRC/31/59, para. 9). Both mandate holders have regularly stressed that the purpose of the mandate is not to protect culture or cultural heritage per se, but rather the conditions allowing all people, without discrimination, to access, participate in and contribute to cultural life in a continuously developing manner.6 16. It has been important for both mandate holders to insist on the universal character of cultural rights by asserting that all people and all peoples have culture, not merely certain categories or geographies of people. Following the approach of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both mandate holders have also recalled that cultures are dynamic human constructs, constantly subject to reinterpretation, and added that while it is customary to refer to culture in the singular, that has problematic methodological and epistemological consequences and should always be understood as plural (see, for example, A/HRC/14/36, para. 6). “Culture” means cultures (A/HRC/31/59, para. 8). 6 4 The three components of the right to take part in cultural life were developed by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its general comment No. 21.