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.