Cultural participation as a human right: holding nation states to account

ABSTRACT

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares participation in the cultural life of the community to be a human right. This is confirmed in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which is a treaty under international law. This commits states to reporting regularly to the UN on their record in upholding the covenanted rights. While states are held to account in regard to high profile human rights by non-government organisations such as Human Rights Watch, this is not the case with the right to cultural participation. This right is largely neglected in both the oversight by the relevant UN committee and in the reporting process by member states. This neglect means that the public is ill-informed in regard to the extent to which their right to cultural participation is being honoured. Proposals are made to begin the process of subjecting this situation to critical appraisal.

KEYWORDS:

• human rights
• cultural rights
• Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In 2020, 25 member states of the UN had not ratified the ICESCR. Of these: 17 had a population of less than one million, constituting mainly small island states; six had neither signed or ratified the covenant (Bhutan, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Sudan, United Arab Emirates), while two had signed but not ratified it (Cuba, USA), that is, it had not been endorsed by their legislative assemblies (https://indicators.ohchr.org/).

2. This may reflect the fact that the right to access culture is stated in the Spanish Constitution (UNESCO 2009, 7).

3. The UN’s annual Human Development Index was devised to challenge the international reliance on purely economic measures of human welfare. It combines life expectancy and educational participation with per capita GDP (UN Development Programme 2020). The UN’s Millennium Development Goals developed this idea further and they were succeeded in 2015 by the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. It involves 17 goals and 230 quantitative indicators, as seen in the on-line SDG Global Database (United Nations, n.d.). This data-base is planned to include data for some 197 UN member states, for each of the last 20 years and, in some cases, disaggregated by age, sex, ethnicity, etc. Early UNESCO work on cultural and human development indicators began in the 1990s (World Commission on Culture and Development 1995; UNESCO 1996; Fukuda-Parr 2000), but the UNESCO (2019) report represented a new approach designed to align with the 2030 Agenda.

4. The omission of sport is surprising given UNESCO’s long involvement with the activity (UNESCO 1978/2014).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

A. J. Veal

A. J. Veal is Adjunct Professor in the Business School, University of Technology Sydney. He previously worked at the University of Birmingham and North London Polytechnic. He is author of numerous books, including: Research Methods for Leisure and Tourism (E5 Pearson, 2018) and Leisure, Sport and Tourism, Politics, Policy and Planning (CABI, 2017) and Whatever Happened to the Leisure Society? (Routledge, 2019).