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17881. Selecting Heritage: The Interplay of Art, Politics and Identity

Author:
Lucas Lixinski
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This article discusses the international protection of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) by a UNESCO-based regime created by the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This Convention has experienced very fast ratification (127 states parties less than seven years after its approval), but this is in no small part attributable to a certain lack of 'legal bite' of the instrument. There are several layers of state sovereignty imbued in the instrument, as well as weak mechanisms for community participation. These are reflected by a state prerogative in determining what the intangible heritage within their territories is for international safeguarding purposes, therefore having the chance to stifle internal dissent by ignoring minority cultures or even appropriating them and depriving them of political meanings. The early practice under the Convention, including the first nominations, puts these structural shortcomings in further evidence. However, recent reforms to the operational directives for the implementation of the Convention have already taken decisive steps towards increasing community participation, even when this means eroding state privileges with regard to the Convention.
Topic:
Politics

17882. Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Living Culture of Peoples

Author:
Federico Lenzerini
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Intangible cultural heritage (ICH), made up of all immaterial manifestations of culture, represents the variety of living heritage of humanity as well as the most important vehicle of cultural diversity. The main 'constitutive factors' of ICH are represented by the 'self-identification' of this heritage as an essential element of the cultural identity of its creators and bearers; by its constant recreation in response to the historical and social evolution of the communities and groups concerned; by its connection with the cultural identity of these communities and groups; by its authenticity; and by its indissoluble relationship with human rights. The international community has recently become conscious that ICH needs and deserves international safeguarding, triggering a legal process which culminated with the adoption in 2003 of the UNESCO Convention on the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage. This Convention correctly highlights the main elements of ICH and is based on the right philosophical rationale, but its operational part – structured on the model provided by the 1972 World Heritage Convention – appears to be inadequate to ensure appropriate safeguarding of the specificities of intangible heritage. This article argues that to correct such inadequacy, international safeguarding of ICH must rely on the concomitant application, even though in an indirect manner, of international human rights law, for the reason that ICH represents a component of cultural human rights and an essential prerequisite to ensure the actual realization and enjoyment of individual and collective rights of its creators and bearers.
Topic:
Human Rights and Culture

17883. The Cultural Rights of Indigenous Peoples:Achievements and Continuing Challenges

Author:
Siegfried Wiessner
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The novel international legal regime of the rights and status of indigenous peoples has emerged in direct response to the concerted efforts and demands of indigenous communities regarding the survival and the flourishing of their distinct cultures. Its high point, as of yet, has been the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, now enjoying virtually universal support. This article locates the regime of the Declaration within post-World War II value-oriented international law; it highlights its novel, essentially communal rights to culture, self-determination, and land; and it assesses its content within existing sources of international law. It ends with an appraisal of the progress made, and an evaluation of the challenges ahead.
Topic:
International Law, United Nations, and Culture

17884. On Fragile Architecture: The UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in the Context of Human Rights

Author:
Karen Engle
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This article traces the development of the international human rights and international indigenous rights movements, with a particular eye towards their points of convergence and divergence and the extent to which each has influenced the other. Focusing on the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, it argues that the document, while apparently pushing the envelope in its articulation of self-determination and collective rights, also represents the continued power and persistence of an international human rights paradigm that eschews strong forms of indigenous self-determination and privileges individual civil and political rights. In this sense, it signifies the continued limitation of human rights, especially in terms of the recognition of collective rights, in a post-Cold War era in which a particular form of human rights has become the lingua franca of both state and non-state actors.
Topic:
Cold War, Human Rights, and United Nations

17885. Towards a Jurisprudential Articulation of Indigenous Land Rights

Author:
Gaetano Pentassuglia
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
As expert analysis concentrates on indigenous rights instruments, particularly the long fought for 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, a body of jurisprudence over indigenous land and resources parallels specialized standard-setting under general human rights treaties. The aim of the present article is to provide a practical and comparative perspective on indigenous land rights based on the process of jurisprudential articulation under such treaties, principally in the Inter-American and African contexts. While specialized standards inevitably generate a view of such rights (and, indeed, indigenous rights more generally) as a set of entitlements separate from general human rights, judicial and quasi-judicial practice as it exists or is being developed within regional and global human rights systems is effectively shaping up their content and meaning. I argue that indigenous land rights jurisprudence reflects a distinctive type of human rights discourse, which is an indispensable point of reference to vest indigenous land issues with greater legal significance. From a practical standpoint, focussing on human rights judicial and quasi-judicial action to expand existing treaty-based regimes and promote constructive partnerships with national courts, though not a panacea to all the intricacies of indigenous rights, does appear to offer a more realistic alternative to advocacy strategies primarily based on universally binding principles (at least at this stage) or the disengagement of domestic systems from international (human rights) law.
Topic:
Human Rights and United Nations
Political Geography:
Africa and America

17886. The Criminalization of Offences against Cultural Heritage in Times of Armed Conflict: The Quest for Consistency

Author:
Micaela Frulli
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This article undertakes a comparative analysis of the two main international legal instruments providing for offences against cultural property and cultural heritage in times of armed conflict in order to assess existing gaps and lacunas, and to make suggestions on how better to advance the protection of cultural property through international criminal law. The International Criminal Court Statute takes a very retrograde attitude to this kind of crime – which the author calls the civilian-use approach – whereas the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict seems far more innovative, preferring a cultural-value oriented approach. The author concludes that the latter approach is more appropriate and that, at present, the most effective tool for pursuing war crimes against cultural property is Protocol II to the 1954 Hague Convention. It is thus crucial to promote ratification by a large number of states and to encourage states to adopt implementing legislation that may allow domestic judges to prosecute the most serious crimes against cultural heritage on the basis of jurisdictional criteria provided for in Protocol II to the 1954 Hague Convention.
Topic:
Culture

17887. Re-envisaging the International Law of Internal Armed Conflict

Author:
Sandesh Sivakumaran
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The regulation of internal armed conflict by international law has come a long way in a very short space of time. Until the early 1990s, there were a minimum of international law rules applicable to internal armed conflict. Today, the situation has changed almost beyond recognition with a healthy body of international law applicable to internal armed conflict. This change has taken place in three principal ways – through analogy to the law of international armed conflict, through resort to international human rights law, and through the use of international criminal law. Each of these approaches stressed its similarity to internal armed conflict or to international humanitarian law. They proved immensely important, filling in what was a more or less blank canvas. However, there are limits to how far they can take us. Today, the canvas is no longer blank and a step back is needed in order to assess the existing state of affairs. Focusing not on the similarities between international and internal armed conflicts or between the various bodies of international law, but on their differences, will allow us to ascertain what further work is in order. It will allow us to identify gaps in regulation and refine relevant rules. It will also force us to re-think our approach to particular issues. Only in this way will we be able to develop the international law of internal armed conflict further.
Topic:
Government, Human Rights, and International Law

17888. Re-envisaging the International Law of Internal Armed Conflict: A Reply to Sandesh Sivakumaran

Author:
Gabriella Blum
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The prevailing view of the form which the effort to regulate non-international armed conflicts should take has been summarized by the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Tadić interlocutory appeal on jurisdiction: '[w]hat is inhumane, and consequently proscribed, in international wars, cannot but be inhumane and inadmissible in civil strife'.This mirroring approach of emulating the laws applicable in international armed conflicts in the non-international context was subsequently adopted by the drafters of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court in 1998; the drafters chose to include a list of war crimes applicable in cases of non-international armed conflicts which resembled (though was still narrower than) the list of crimes applicable in international conflicts. The recent Kampala ICC review conference expanded the non-international crimes list, further narrowing the gap between the 'international' and the 'non-international' lists of crimes.Taking a similar position, the 2005 study on customary international humanitarian law (IHL) published by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded that all but a handful of the rules identified as customary applied in international and non-international armed conflicts equally.Given the traditional resistance by states to assuming the same degree and range of constraints which apply in international armed conflicts in internal ones, humanitarian advocates have sought to advance the regulation of internal armed conflicts by supplementing IHL with norms borrowed from international criminal law (ICL) and international human rights laws (IHRL). The resulting international law of internal armed conflicts has thus been a patchwork of norms which ostensibly apply to all non-international armed conflicts, drawn from the IHL of international conflicts, ICL, and IHRL, often proving to be incoherent, unworkable, and ineffective. Sandesh Sivakumaran's contribution to this volumetakes a critical view of the path …
Topic:
Development, Government, and International Law

17889. Re-envisaging the International Law of Internal Armed Conflict: A Rejoinder to Gabriella Blum

Author:
Sandesh Sivakumaran
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
I am grateful to Professor Gabriella Blum for her thoughtful response to my article. Blum's response invites further consideration of three principal issues. She notes my use of the terminology of 'internal' as opposed to 'non-international' armed conflict and its juxtaposition with 'international' armed conflict and queries whether my 'methodological approach as well as specific suggestions would remain equally compelling in other types of non-international armed conflicts'. The choice of terminology was deliberate. I find the descriptor 'non-international' to be somewhat misleading as it unhelpfully defines the category by what it is not. It suggests that there is but one armed conflict and, if it is not international in character, by default it is non-international. However, in practice, an internal/non-international armed conflict is identified in a rather different manner. For example, in order for an internal/non-international armed conflict to exist, the violence must reach a certain level of intensity; yet, for an international armed conflict to exist one dominant view is that there is no such requirement. The category of internal/non-international armed conflict is thus in no way a default category which serves to catch those conflicts which are excluded from the international category. Yet this is what is suggested through the use of the terminology of 'non-international' armed conflict. What the terminology of 'internal' may suggest is that it is limited to those conflicts which are fought entirely within the territorial boundaries of a state. However, even this may be true only up to a certain point. For example, an internal armed conflict with a certain overspill, such as onto the high seas or into the territory of a third state, is still characterized as an internal …
Topic:
Government, Human Rights, and International Law
Political Geography:
Sri Lanka

17890. Steven Wheatley. The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law

Author:
Ingo Venzke
Publication Date:
02-2011
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The concept of global governance epitomizes transformations in the structure of political organization and highlights changes in the ways in which public authority is exercised. Times of change invite scholars to contemplate the plausibility of orthodox beliefs and doctrinal concepts. They push them towards innovation and there is indeed a strong sense among international lawyers that the terms of debate about the legitimacy of international law are shifting. A number of contributions over the past years have tried to respond to the challenges which phenomena of global governance pose to international legal scholarship. 1 The mounting wealth of literature now comes to speak in Steven Wheatley's book on The Democratic Legitimacy of International Law in which he calls on the legal profession to engage with questions of first principle, to reflect on the nature of international law, and to consider in closer detail the justification of legal constraints beyond the state. The book's main argument is at the outset rather straightforward. Wheatley observes a proliferation of sites of norm production and argues that the delegation of authority to international or transnational actors inevitably involves a loss for democracy. To remedy this deficit, he suggests restating requirements for democratic legitimacy in terms of the deliberative ideal as it is developed in the work of Jürgen Habermas. The book claims the use of Habermas' thought as its innovative edge, and develops its core argument accordingly. '[T]he legitimate exercise of public authority through law', it claims, 'is conditioned by respect for the cardinal principles of deliberative democracy: equality and public reason' (at 2). The book begins by taking stock of accounts suggesting that state sovereignty has lost its plausibility as an exclusive reference point in normative argument. While the grand variety of approaches under discussion converge in agreement on the facts of what …
Topic:
International Law and Governance