Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Shaheed, Farida --- "The United Nations cultural rights mandate: reflections on the significance and challenges" [2017] ELECD 1425; in Belder, Lucky; Porsdam, Helle (eds), "Negotiating Cultural Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 21

Book Title: Negotiating Cultural Rights

Editor(s): Belder, Lucky; Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781786435415

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: The United Nations cultural rights mandate: reflections on the significance and challenges

Author(s): Shaheed, Farida

Number of pages: 16

Abstract/Description:

Being the first mandate holder in any area of human rights carries the distinct privilege of freely exploring the scope and normative content of that right as well as the opportunity to lay out a framework to respect, protect, and promote those rights by defining their scope and content. This privilege comes with responsibility and challenges, however. This duality of privilege and challenge as the first mandate holder was an aspect that I was acutely aware of throughout my tenure first as Independent Expert and then Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. All first mandate-holders undoubtedly face challenges. With respect to cultural rights, however, the usual challenges were compounded by several less usual factors. To start with, unlike other areas of human rights where there is a fairly clear notion of what the human rights violations might be, if not always the solutions, in the case of cultural rights there was little clarity about exactly what this mandate would be about. The ambiguity and lack of precision is reflected in the title of the mandate itself: ‘in the field of cultural rights’, rather than simply ‘cultural rights’.