The relationship between human rights and cultural heritage has transited from long detachment to growing interconnection. UNESCO’s contemporary focus on intangible heritage and cultural diversity, or the recent activity of international human rights agencies that have developed the content of cultural rights, are both relevant instances of a promising, fertile dialogue between the two realms.

This has taken place in a climate in which the long neglected category of cultural rights is being progressively incorporated into the public discourse, either to help framing development more adequately, to address minorities rights –in particular of indigenous peoples-, or even to counter balance neoliberalism.

Within this context, cultural heritage professionals have increasingly acknowledged that heritage practice has human rights implications and that this is not a mere formal issue, but one with material, social effects. Far from restricting these implications to the mere conceptualisation of cultural heritage as a fundamental right, of specific interest is the academic reflection on the power dynamics arising in heritage practice, particularly when it is entwined in typically asymmetrical relationships, i.e. those involving the state or intergovernmental organisations. These imbalances are frequently framed by institutional verticality and tensions between macro and micro interests, and often relate to a notion of heritage that has been repeatedly contested and is associated with the World Heritage system created in 1972.

In the face of these disparities, UNESCO and heritage scholars are calling for a human rights-based approach (HRBA) to heritage practice. The HRBA has been advocated in the development sector for over a decade, but only lately it is being ‘imported’ to the heritage realm, where the most relevant documents on the subject have been produced for World Heritage processes, namely: (a) UNESCO’s 2015 Policy for Sustainable Development, and (b) the 2017 report on ‘Our Common Dignity Initiative’, the culmination of a project undertaken by UNESCO’s three Advisory Bodies.

The HRBA is being presented as a means to understand heritage’s broader context, as a conceptual framework to promote community involvement and to address the structural inequalities that are frequent in heritage management, and as a decisive good governance strategy for amending cultural wrongs, which places people at the centre and encourages their input and self-determination, with especial attention to the most vulnerable.

Although this approach is mostly celebrated, far from unreflectively assimilate it –as often happens with internationally constructed frameworks and discourses-, it would be convenient to analyse and understand the HRBA and its implications more thoroughly, as well as its shortcomings.

My investigation aims first to typify the HRBA and its application to cultural heritage: its rationale, elements, scope and implications. To this aim, it is useful to appraise the experience of the development sector and the main concerns arising from it; but also to address others regarding broader critiques to human rights and practical challenges for putting the HRBA into practice.

With the potential limitations of the HRBA in mind, I propose to analyse a different perspective that may result enriching. For 25 years, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) has developed a distinctive case law in which specific aspects of culture play a central role in the adjudication of other legal claims, chiefly the recognition of indigenous people’s fundamental entitlement to land and natural resources.

The Court has consistently acknowledged the particular relationship indigenous peoples have with their lands as essentially defining their cultural identity and sustaining their survival, tactically harnessing the interrelation between rights and culture in the pursue of justice and dignity. My proposition is that cultural heritage has effectively underlined and supported broader claims arising from the power imbalances the HRBA is concerned with, and that it is then worth approaching the Court’s work as a lens for addressing the HRBA to heritage.

Thus, I will select and analyse the relevant judicial precedents of the IACHR in which these issues have been addressed, with the twofold purpose of, first, characterising this juridical path to cultural heritage; and second, to contrast it with the HRBA that is being currently proposed to cultural heritage, in the hopes of enriching it with a Latin American perspective.

The investigation should be finished by late September this year, so by the time the CLACSO takes place, the outcomes should be ready to be presented. This summary is presented in English because the work will be conducted in that language. However, it is possible to present it as well in Spanish.