Macmillan, Fiona --- "Human Rights, Cultural Property and Intellectual Property: Three Concepts in Search of a Relationship" [2008] ELECD 325; in Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira (eds), "Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: Intellectual Property and Traditional Cultural Expressions in a Digital Environment

Editor(s): Graber, Beat Christoph; Burri-Nenova, Mira

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847209214

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Human Rights, Cultural Property and Intellectual Property: Three Concepts in Search of a Relationship

Author(s): Macmillan, Fiona

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

4. Human rights, cultural property and
intellectual property: three concepts in
search of a relationship
Fiona Macmillan

1. INTRODUCTION
A concern with the concept of "human rights" has become the great millennial
obsession. This is not to suggest that any major steps have been made with
respect to the improved recognition or enforcement of some of the most basic
rights generally recognised as falling within the "human rights" camp.
However, we have emerged from one of the bloodiest and most violent
centuries of human history with a renewed respect for the idea of human
rights. In a wide range of literature, academic and activist, this plays itself out
by regarding the characterisation of something as a human right as a "trump
card", that is, as the end to all arguments. This may be a worthy phenomenon,
but it carries with it implicit dangers. If everything that seems a good or fair
or morally defensible thing automatically becomes a "human right" then every
so-called human right is reduced to the symbolic and legal significance of the
most banal and the very idea of "human rights" as the unsurpassable moral
high ground, the trumps of trumps, disappears. This is a particularly undesir-
able state of affairs in a world where it is already the case, at least in the
context of international legal governance, that human rights are not a trump
card.1

1 See Robert Howse, "Human Rights in the WTO: Whose Rights, What
Humanity?" (2002) European Journal of International ...