Ms Janet Elizabeth BLAKE

• Associate Professor, Department of Islamic Law, Faculty of Law, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran

• Session 4: Presenter 1

Identifying Possible Mechanisms for Ensuring More Effective Community Involvement in the Intergovernmental Processes of UNESCO’s 2003 Convention

The 2003 Convention requires States Parties to ensure the effective involvement of local communities, groups and individuals, as well as experts, centres of expertise and research institutions, in the implementation of the Convention. To apply such an approach at the intergovernmental level requires the development of new approaches and mechanisms. However, in the Operation Directives (OD) to the 2003 Convention, the intergovernmental Committee only adopted a very limited degree of participation of communities, groups and experts in the meetings of the Committee “in order to sustain an interactive dialogue” (OD 89) and it has proved difficult to translate the concept of community participation into practical terms within this intergovernmental framework. This paper’s main aim, therefore, is to identify approaches towards community participation at the intergovernmental level that can reduce the sense of disconnect between the global and the local within the Convention, as well as useful mechanisms to support this. Some other intergovernmental and treaty-based bodies have attempted to involve local communities and/or Indigenous peoples more directly in their policy- and decision-making processes, in particular the Committee of the Economic, Social and Cultural Rights Covenant of 1966 (ECOSOC), the Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), the International Labour Organization (ILO), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Conference of Parties to the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD). This paper, then, will evaluate previous attempts made within UNESCO to involve local communities and Indigenous peoples at the operational level and identify whether any of these structures already developed might be a useful basis for the Committee to work with. It will also examine the various approaches can be a useful basis for the Committee to work with. It will also examine the experiences of other intergovernmental bodies in order to (a) evaluate how successful (or otherwise) they have been and (b) consider whether they offer useful models for the Intergovernmental Committee of the 2003 Convention to emulate.

Keywords: Community involvement, Intangible cultural heritage, UNESCO’s 2003 Convention, Mechanisms, Intergovernmental frameworks.

The Committee does not have any tool to verify the veracity of the contents of the Reports or other views expressed by other stakeholders. The question arises of which communities, groups or individuals could best express opinions different from those of the governments concerned.

Janet Blake is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Shahid Beheshti (Tehran) where she teaches International, Environmental and Human Rights Law and is a member of the UNESCO Chair for Human Rights, Peace and Democracy and the Centre for Excellence in Education for Sustainable Development based at the university. She is also a member of the Cultural Heritage Law Committee of the International Law Association and has acted as an International Consultant to UNESCO since 1999, mostly in the field of intangible cultural heritage and implementing the 2003 Convention. Since 2015, she has also been a Global Facilitator for UNESCO’s Capacity-building under the 2003 Convention and has provided advice at governmental level on developing national law and policy for ICH safeguarding. She has published a commentary on the 2003 Convention and her research monograph on International Cultural Heritage Law was published by Oxford University Press in June 2015.