HR4RS stamp
Raul Garcia Hemonnet
The study is entitled 'Cultural rights. Towards a new generation of public policies. Situation and commitments of Spain with the International Community', has been recently published by Fundación Alternativas, and its co-author is the professor of the Area of Public International Law and International Relations, Beatriz Barreiro. In it, the authors analyze that "after decades of democratic cultural policies, a general consideration emerges that the cultural services offered by the State (at its different levels) to citizens seem to be voluntary and/or circumstantial."
Faced with this situation and taking into account social needs, teachers consider it necessary to "develop a definition (or redefinition) of the concept of General Interest and Common Good in the cultural sector in a participatory and balanced manner, overcoming old principles that prioritize some cultural fields (heritage , institutions, large facilities, etc.) from other fields of cultural life or ways that citizens adopt to satisfy their cultural needs in the exercise of their rights. Seeking a balance between the role of the State, the market and the initiative of the third sector”.
They also advocate the need for a broader diagnosis when developing cultural policies for contemporary societies that take into account the diversity of these societies and equal access to culture and cultural participation.
In this sense, they cite experiences for the establishment of “minimum cultural services”, to guarantee the right to participate in cultural life in accordance with the contextual particularities and the availability of resources. The authors mention the delivery of a 'voucher/bonus' or card to facilitate the consumption of these services and goods, which has been carried out in Navarra. Likewise, the establishment, in France, of the “universal public service of culture”.
More citizen participation
Although the authors acknowledge the positive aspects of these 'services', they recommend in their report that “they be established based on processes of citizen participation, taking into account tradition, the cultural situation of their surroundings, attention to intergenerational needs and the socioeconomic reality ”.
The minimum services are a commitment in terms of a social pact for culture by the State. Differentiating these policies from those of attracting tourism through culture with the supply of basic cultural services, which must benefit from other strategies, although they may be related, the report points out.
The authors propose two "key force ideas" as inspiring cultural public policies that respond adequately to the challenges of contemporary Spanish society, respecting and promoting the dignity of the human being.
On the one hand, they point out, “the idea of citizen access to (and, above all, participation in) cultural life. On the other hand, the idea that a healthy and fertile society in the creation of shared common projects needs to respect and promote cultural diversity, with full attention to people belonging to minority cultural communities”.
Human rights and cultural policy
The report is committed to putting Human and Cultural Rights at the center of public policies related to this area, in this sense the authors consider that this is a "still virgin" terrain with regard to Spain that is still almost unexplored, both in theory and in practice with regard to the cultural expressions of minority communities, understanding culture as a broad concept.
They defend that there is no single model and that each society must attend to its own contexts. Thus, a model can work in one country and not necessarily in another, and they call for reflection on this issue in the face of the rise of xenophobic populism that is increasingly present in society, taking as an example the limits of the British and French models in this matter.
They are committed to the States and Spain in particular working on the combination of the perspective of non-discrimination and the promotion of cultural/religious expressions with others that appear, in their opinion, "as clearly necessary to avoid, on the one hand, both invisibility of minority cultural expressions and their loss - when it comes to living expressions that allow members of a group the protection and protection of their dignity as well as of another, a kind of overprotection of religious expressions”.
That is why it seems interesting to accommodate, the authors indicate, together with this basic principle of human rights, proposals such as the movements for a Secular State, inasmuch as such a combination would allow, in our opinion, to avoid a conception of culture (and religion ) as watertight compartments in which the different cultural and religious communities have little incentive to interact in public space.
Law of Culture and protection of participation
Likewise, they favor “the development of a general cultural law based on a cultural human rights approach that reflects the advances made in International Law and included in the report, and that, in fact, bind our State. Thus, this law could include the possibility even that the right to participate in cultural life be prosecutable ",
In short, they point out “in the current context where crises of nation states converge with difficulties in articulating democratic legitimacy, culture can play an important role. In this sense, a certain evolution of state cultural policies to cultural policies for citizens is proposed, where the role of the state evolves towards a facilitating function of the exercise of rights and guarantee. A focus on rights for cultural policies allows us to move towards a greater inclusion of cultural needs in the catalog of collective needs that modern states must guarantee to citizens for full human rights”.