cultural rights
Negotiating Cultural Rights
On Friday night, 13 November 2015, the terrorist attacks in Paris took place. Attacks on big city cultural life, spending the evening with friends in concert halls, café’s and bistros, a foodball stadium. That same night was the end of the first day of the International Conference Negotiating Cultural Rights in Copenhagen. This conference celebrated the end of the mandate of the Special Rapporteur (SR) in the field of cultural rights, Fareedah Shaheed, and the publication of eleven reports in the period 2010-2015. At the conference, we had just concluded that cultural rights had grown from the Cinderella of human rights into a beautiful princess. Today, it seems that this princess has to grow up even faster than expected, because we are in need of a Queen of Spades that stands for the protection of cultural rights.