The Inherent Human Right to Cultural Heritage, Exploring its Significance

In recent years, global institutions like the UN and UNESCO have increasingly

treated obligations to preserve cultural heritage as obligations to uphold human rights.

Owing to the relative novelty of this approach, little work has been done to see what

exactly such rights would be and how this treatment of cultural heritage could be

justified. Not only is it unclear what the foundations of a human right to cultural heritage

are or what precisely such a right ought to entail, but it is equally uncertain what is meant

by cultural heritage in the first place. Considering this, the aims of the Book are the

following: (i) provide a philosophically robust definition of cultural heritage and its social

value that could serve as a foundation of the human rights approach to cultural heritage;

(ii) building on this understanding of cultural heritage, provide a systematic conceptual

analysis of obligations to preserve cultural heritage understood in the language of human

rights. The Book defends a constructionist-inspired account of cultural heritage,

according to which cultural heritage is not primarily about historical objects and

practices, but rather about how we employ such objects and practices to make sense of

our internal and external worlds, both as individuals and as communities. Equipped with

this understanding of cultural heritage the Book provides a justification of a human right

to cultural heritage by appealing to the centrality of cultural heritage to our individual

normative agency. This is followed by a discussion of the limits of a human right to

cultural heritage, where such limits are determined by its harmful uses. Lastly, the Book

provides a discussion of legal duties that a human right to cultural heritage will generate

and briefly considers whose responsibility such duties are.