How (un)readable are the European and UNESCO Cultural Conventions in the Digital Era?

Abstract

In 1954, the Members of the Council of Europe adopted the European Cultural Convention. In 2005, UNESCO ratified a Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. In 2017, the Conference of Parties at the 2005 Convention approved the Operational Guidelines on the Implementation of the Convention in the Digital Environment.
 How different, or similar, are these documents in terms of (legal) language and contents? The literature has long discussed the features hallmarking the language of the law. Do these characteristics also apply to international conventions? Are these documents somehow affected, or influenced, by the digital era and media discourse? This paper aims to answer these questions by exploring the (dis)similarities among these important documents in terms of content and use of legal terminology vis-à-vis the global media landscape. It will shed light on the accessibility and intelligibility of these documents to the layperson in terms of clarity, content, sentence structure and syntax. It will explore whether any form of legalese is applied and whether the drafting style is either formal or informal; solemn or simple, and (un)influenced by media or digital language. The paper findings will remark that the European Convention and, surprisingly, the more recent UNESCO Convention, are characterized by a formal, detached and rather archaic style, being addressed to its member states. To some extent, instead, the Operational Guidelines are more reader-friendly and accessible to the (digital) layperson. They contain, in fact, more elements of plain English and cater for the new rights of Internet users.