Protection and promotion of cultural heritage and human rights through international treaties: two worlds of difference?

Since a number of years, the link between human rights and cultural heritage, in particular intangible cultural heritage, has been firmly established. At the same time, it should be noted that the two topics are often discussed in different intergovernmental for a and cultural heritage and human rights have their own separate international legal instruments, which have commonalities, but also important differences. These differences make the connection between human rights and cultural heritage more complex than it may seem at first glance.

This chapter compares several treaties on human rights and on cultural heritage and analyses their similarities and differences. Attention will be paid to the different nature of these treaties and the differences resulting therefrom in relation to several issues, such as the scope of application, rights and obligations, reciprocity, reservations, denunciation, and monitoring. The treaties and these issues are analyzed on the basis of the general principles of treaty law that are laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze and show the main similarities and differences between human rights treaties and cultural heritage treaties, seen from the perspective of several tenets of public international law. This analysis shows that although human rights and cultural heritage are clearly linked as concepts or values and that the protection of cultural heritage has important human rights components, the international legal underpinning of these concepts is different and the international legal instruments protecting one or the other are of a different character. This may explain the fact that their protection may not always run parallel but seems to operate in two different worlds.