The destruction of minorities and indigenous peoples' intangible cultural heritage in peacetime - A cohering human rights-based approach to a fragmented international legal system

In a world seemingly driven by legal pluralism and multiculturalism precepts, the protection of the vague and ambiguously defined concept of 'intangible cultural heritage' remains largely unsatisfactory. Cultural practices falling under the umbrella term 'intangible cultural heritage' must avoid a multitude of obstacles to which they will be ineluctably confronted. Some of these obstacles operate outside of anyone's agency. This is the case of these external processes such as globalisation and the unwelcome effects of acculturation and cultural loss that it produces; of increasing digitalisation and industrialisation phenomena which indirectly jeopardise the authenticity of the heritage and its raison d'être; and of the neoliberal capitalist trend of society which tends to extinguish non-economically profitable cultural practices (R. Coombe, 2015; Strakosch, 2015). Nevertheless, there also exists a wider set of problems facing intangible cultural heritage today, caused by ascertainable and identifiable 'culprits', illustrated by scenarios of misappropriation and biopiracy (A. Chapman, 2002). What does not contribute is the fragmentation of the international legal framework relating to intangible cultural heritage. As a matter of fact, numerous international legal regimes overlap in this regard: international human rights law arguably including Indigenous Peoples' law, international cultural heritage law, international environmental law or intellectual property law. As a consequence, the solution given by international law is a fragmented one at best, an incoherent one at worst. This doctoral research project seeks to determine how to holistically safeguard intangible cultural heritage, in light of Indigenous Peoples' 'cosmovisions' and minorities' collective conceptions of culture, in this fragmented international legal landscape. Grounding the analysis in Third World Approaches to International Law perspectives (TWAIL), the conceptual framework of human rights law has been chosen to recognise a new human right to intangible cultural heritage. The argument that a human-rights based approach to intangible cultural heritage is the solution to harmonise international law in this respect will be made. This unfolds either through the direct application and extension of jurisprudential human rights frameworks (the right to property, the right to minorities or the right to privacy); or through the application of a human-rights prism to specialised international regimes, notably international intellectual property law and international environmental law.