Defining the Right to Participate in Cultural Life as a Human Right

Abstract

Drawing on Cass Sunstein's theory of incompletely theorized and specified agreements, this article intends to describe, explain and assess the legal regime of the right to participate in cultural life in international law. It offers a redefinition of this human right as an incompletely theorised and specified agreement in order to make this human right suitable for a certain degree of operationalization. As a first step, this article qualifies the right to participate in cultural life as an incompletely generalized agreement: people do not agree on the theoretical foundations of this human right although there seems to be a loose agreement on the recognition of some component of this human right. As a second step, this article intends to show that the right to participate in cultural life worked and still works as an incompletely specified agreement: monitoring bodies have not yet received much possibility to make clear and operationalise it even if there was an agreement reached on this human right as a low level principle. This contribution then offered a redefinition of the right to participate in cultural life which aims at authorising an agreement on this human right as a ‘mid-level principle’ whenever there is still disagreement existing on the foundation of this latter right. Taking into account the dynamic and moving features of cultural life and the general and adaptive nature of international human rights law, this article intends to elaborate a legally relevant definition of the right to participate in cultural life as an incompletely generalised and specified agreement on a low level principle. This definition tries to open a third way between a restrictive definition of the right to participate in cultural life as a right to access a set of definite artworks and the broad ‘anthropological’ definition given in General Comment No. 21 of the Committee on economic, social and cultural rights.