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Project Topic
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This project investigates how human rights guarantees in relation to cultural heritage are being understood and implemented in the EU and in its neighbouring countries. It focuses on Poland, the United Kingdom and Italy - countries representing different cultural, political and legal traditions - and their relations with other states and non-state cultural communities. Acknowledging the changing nature of the right to cultural heritage, the project maps how this rights evolving content affects the forms of protection, access to and governance of cultural heritage. The added value of the project consists in combining an analysis of the relevant laws, their implementation and enforcement. Firstly, it provides a theoretical re-conceptualization of the right to cultural heritage, focusing not only on positive law and jurisprudence, but also on soft-law rules, diplomacy and cultural cooperation as possible alternative devices for fostering inter-cultural dialogue and understanding. Secondly, in its practical perspective, the project analyses how the technical tools used to manage and protect cultural heritage, in particular digitization processes with the development of databases, virtual museums, etc., are currently considered and how they could be further developed to strengthen the enforcement of the right to cultural heritage throughout the EU, including its external action.
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Project Results
(after finalisation)
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Cross-cutting insights on how heritage is defined, used and managed in decisionand and
policy-making and avenues to strengthen its protection, access, and
governance, especially through the elaboration of recommendations and guidelines
– openly accessible via an online platform – concerning best practices for the use of
cultural heritage.
• A new digitised heritage platform - an online database comprising historical
photographic archives in Central and Eastern Europe, preserved at the Institute of
Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, and documenting the nonexistent
cultural heritage of Europe’s Eastern Borderlands, while interrogating the
access to this forgotten and contested cultural heritage through digital technologies.
• An external network of experts, stakeholders, public institutions and organisations in
the field of cultural heritage (UNESCO, UNIDROIT, UN Human Rights Council,
International Law Association, European Parliament, European Commission,
European Investment Bank, Ministries of culture).
• Several national and regional case-studies: Poland, Ukraine and Eastern
Partnership; Poland and Germany cultural heritage legal relations; access of
cultural heritage in the United Kingdom, including in its external relations (with
Europe but also with former colonies) and through digitisation; European Union and
the Western Balkans (Slovenia, Croatia, and Serbia).
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