Cultural Rights and Cultural Policy: identifying the cultural policy implications of culture as a human right

This article explores the parameters of ‘culture’ as a Human Right – Cultural Rights – and culture in the Human Rights system of international law and its now globally-pervasive set of axioms. The article attends to definitional issues on the use of culture to determine critical loci of human identity formation and fundamental ethics, and the use of culture to conceptualise the scope and scale of human freedom. Its aim is to define Cultural Rights in direct relation to the interests of cultural policy making and more importantly in relation to the scholarly field of cultural policy research. This will involve defining the legal-institutional sphere of Human Rights and range of applications but only insofar as to focus on issues central to current cultural policy research and its contingent questions of interpretation (such as the meaning of a ‘cultural right’ in particular social contexts). The secondary aim of this article is to define how cultural policy research (historically invested in particular historical evolution of national arts traditions and heritage management) could be central to the study of ‘rights-based’ global development.