CULTURAL RIGHTS & THEIR RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER HUMAN RIGHTS By Helle Porsdam, UNESCO Chair in Cultural Rights What Are Cultural Rights? Cultural rights constitute one of the most exciting new frontiers of human rights research and practice. They enable people to aspire to a better future for themselves, and they play a key role in realizing all other human rights. Furthermore, they provide a much-needed discourse or common forum in which we can come to new cross-cultural understandings. All of this is supremely important today, at a time when respect for cultural diversity is a key concern worldwide, and when migration and advances in technology are increasing the level of cultural exchange but also risk causing cultural clashes and incompatibilities previously hidden by distance.3 There are four core cultural human rights: the right to education, the right to participate in cultural life, the right to benefit from scientific progress and its applications, and rights of authors. First outlined in Articles 26 and 27 of the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), these rights were made legally binding on ratifying states by the 1966 International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). Considering cultural rights to be universal human rights (the drafters of both documents put cultural rights into the fourth section of the UDHR (Articles 22 through 27)) was considered, at the time of its passage, to be the most groundbreaking part of the new declaration. UDHR Article 27 reads, “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.” In 1966, the wording of Article 27 was repeated almost verbatim in ICESCR, whose Articles 15(1)(a) and (b) discuss the right of everyone “to participate in cultural life” and “to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and its applications,” respectively. The UDHR is a declaration, an ideal standard of rights held in common by nations, but it bears no force of law. Work on codifying these rights into a legally binding entity began almost immediately, but geopolitical developments such as the Cold War and decolonization processes as well as differences in economic and social philosophies made it very difficult to reach an agreement among the UN member states. Between 1949 and 1951, the Commission on Human Rights worked on a single draft covenant, which 3 6 See Helle Porsdam, The Transforming Power of Cultural Rights (Cambridge University Press, 2019).