This article examines the relationship between the World Heritage Convention and international human rights law. The first part of the article draws on key phrases in Article 1 of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) Constitution, which defines its purpose to elaborate on the role of human rights to UNESCO’s mandate and how developments in international human rights law over the last 75 years have been translated into the organization’s policies and programs and the implementation of the World Heritage Convention. The second part details how human rights violations related to World Heritage properties expose significant shortcomings in UNESCO’s fulfillment of its mandate and states’ compliance with international human rights norms. The third part outlines the international responsibility of various actors in respect of serious violations of human rights related to World Heritage properties. The final part identifies possible areas of reform in the operation of the World Heritage Convention that may facilitate its alignment with international human rights law and UNESCO’s adherence to its mandate.

This essay makes the case that law in most of Africa has, since colonial times, been used as a framework of domination and imperialism. This has always been through repugnancy/supremacy clauses, which were predicated on the highly problematic assumption that European ways of knowing were superior to the African ones. This essay also demonstrates that, sadly, these clauses are still on the statute books of many African countries and continue to haunt the protection through law of Africa’s precious and unique tangible and intangible cultural heritage. The essay also shows that another way through whichthe development of African heritage was arrested through law was by criminalizing traditional Indigenous practices, which European imperial powers did not fully understand in terms of ontology. It is also argued that the same problems bedeviling the legal protection of African cultural heritage at the domestic level haunt this protection, even at the regional level(s). African regional courts continue to sadly apply alien notions of law to the exclusion of majority Africans. International law, being state-centric, has not been applied in the African context to revolutionarily protect African heritage. Where it has done so, it has been failed by the states or has been generally limited by its problematic colonial foundations. Finally, it is agued that African states need to de-elitesize, de-Westernize and decolonize the law if it is to effectively protect cultural heritage and property and make meaning to the ordinary African. This is urgent and imperative from a cultural, security and geopolitical vantagepoint.

Fifty years after the ratification of the World Heritage Convention, we have come to learn that there is a huge discrepancy between the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s (UNESCO) ideals of protecting heritage sites with outstanding universal values and unmatched realities in situ. I attempt to elucidate what World Heritage ideals of heritage protection are held in iconic sites in Southeast Asia. The studied sites are ancient monumental heritage sites of national importance – namely, Borobudur of Indonesia, Sukhothai and Ayutthaya of Thailand, and Angkor of Cambodia. The authorities in these countries have converted heritage sites into parks for visitors and for capitalization, which has placed authenticity and integrity at stake as well as converting the sites for contestation between the authorities and local communities. In order to solve the dilemma of the World Heritage ideals and their unwanted realities, I explore possible effective approaches for UNESCO and its partners to take into consideration.

Since the late 1990s, the American museum community has nobly sought to resolve restitution claims involving Nazi-looted art in an equitable fashion. Under the auspices of various ethical guidelines recognizing the horrific tragedies of the Holocaust, museums have made a commitment to purge their collections of artwork tainted by Nazi theft. It remains unclear, however, whether these guidelines govern restitution claims that are based not on Nazi theft but on coerced sales arising from Nazi persecution. This article argues that the scope of the guidelines should be expanded to govern restitution claims arising from coerced sales, and that coerced sales include not only sales in which the Nazis participated but also private sales made by individuals who, as a direct result of Nazi persecution, who were forced to sell their artwork to flee or otherwise survive the Holocaust.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: I would especially like to thank Professor Stephen Urice for his indispensable insight and overall support in the development of this article. I would also like to thank Ildi DeAngelis and Professor John Merryman for their excellent suggestions, and Thaddeus Stauber for his willingness to discuss the Martha Nathan cases.

In this Act, unless the contrary intention appears:

Africa as a continent has been hit by the coronavirus – the COVID-19 pandemic – as have many parts of the world. Many African Union (AU) member states were badly hit by the virus, while others were only mildly impacted. The arts, culture, and heritage sectors have been severely hit by the pandemic. Fortunately, in many countries in Africa, arts, culture, and heritage were placed at the heart of strategic priorities at the national, regional, and continental levels of combating COVID-19.

The aim of this special issue is the investigation and contextualization of specific arts practices for what they can show us about the transmission and ownership of knowledge. Our authors make explicit the modes of sharing that are part of the creative process in contemporary dance and in Irish traditional music and examine the principles of transmission and social mores that allow ideas to move between practitioners. This introduction sets out some context for the issue and our approach, which is to work alongside practitioners to understand and reveal the social principles and expectations of ownership that are part of the process of producing these art forms.

Michael F. Brown, Who Owns Native Culture?. Pp. xiii+315. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, London, 2003. ISBN 0-674-01171-6.

Michael Brown has written a book that must be read by all who have a serious concern with heritage, particularly that where the interests of “native” peoples are involved. Throughout the book, there is evidence of extensive research and careful analysis of the often complex issues that he raises. But it is not a dry tome. A sense of humor appears. Describing the ethnobotanist Richard Schultes, of Harvard University, Brown says: “He may have been the only Republican in America who freely admitted to having sampled just about every mind-altering plant yet discovered in the New World” (p. 96). The book is written in a clear style with no use of jargon.

Abstract: This article provides one of the first presentations of the Law of the Republic of Moldova on Archaeological Heritage Preservation recently approved by the Moldovan Parliament. Since 1993, Moldova has had a general law on monument preservation, but the part on archaeological heritage was poorly developed. The new law is the first of its kind in Moldova and was established according to the principles of the European and International Conventions signed in recent years by the Republic of Moldova. This law opens new avenues for Moldovan society to improve the situation in of its archaeological heritage, specifically to fight the black market in archaeology and illegal trafficking of antiquities.

The revitalization of fermentation projects during COVID-19 raises questions about the preservation of the pandemic’s material and ephemeral effects – a topic that heritage policy is well equipped to engage. These activities also emphasize the necessity of engaging with heritage practices as a kind of care, encompassing both methods of safekeeping and practices of empathy. In addition, heritage ferments prove “good to think” around themes of loss and preservation, the interpretation of novel viruses through traditional food practices, and the coupling of heritage to microbes. Connecting microbes with heritage allows us to consider points of overlap: as bearers of patrimony with cultural and material lineages, as central to heritage tastes, and as open to geographical indications or other protections to further a kind of microbial resource management. Despite the pandemic’s devastating impact, consideration of heritage ferments points to both emancipatory and constraining outcomes for our post-pandemic future.

On 30 September 2015, the government of Eritrea issued Proclamation no. 177/2015, the Cultural and Natural Heritage Proclamation of Eritrea, to govern the country’s cultural and natural heritage. Instrumental in the inscription of the nation’s capital, Asmara, in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s World Heritage List, the Proclamation simultaneously governs cultural (tangible and intangible) and natural heritage. The author, the main drafter of the Proclamation, discusses issues and alternatives that were debated during the drafting process, lists the key issues in relation to implementation of the Proclamation, and suggests recommendations on the way forward.

In the profoundly changing and dynamic world of contemporary audiovisual media, what has remained surprisingly unaffected is regulation. In the European Union, the new Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS), proposed by the European Commission on 13 December 2005, should allegedly rectify this situation. Amending the existing Television without Frontiers Directive, it should offer a “fresh approach” and meet the challenge of appropriately regulating media in a complex environment. It is meant to achieve a balance between the free circulation of TV broadcast and new audiovisual media and the preservation of values of cultural identity and diversity, while respecting the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality inherent to the European Community (EC). This paper examines whether and how the changes envisaged to the EC audiovisual media regime might influence cultural diversity in Europe. It addresses subseqently the question of whether the new AVMS properly safeguards the balance between competition and the public interest in this regard, or whether cultural diversity remains a mere political banner.Acknowledgements: The present study emerged from my work for the project “eDiversity: The Legal Protection of Cultural Diversity in a Digital Networked Environment,” part of the Swiss National Centre for Competence in Research (NCCR): Trade Regulation. This article would not have been possible without the previous work done by Christoph Beat Graber and his valuable comments. Further thanks go to Miriam Sahlfeld for critical feedback on earlier drafts and Susan Kaplan for improving the language. Any errors of fact or interpretation are my own.