Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage

This essay offers a brief summary of the historical, political and legal factors leading up to the adoption of the Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, which came into effect on April 2006 as a legal instrument intended to protect the intangible expressions and manifestations of traditional, popular cultures. According to the author, the need for such an instrument became patent when the phenomenon of globalization threatened to wipe out age-old traditions, languages, dialects and other cultural expressions considered part and parcel of the identity of civilizations and an inexhaustible source of cultural diversity. In the first part of his essay, Michel Blin gives a rundown of the initiatives and initial efforts made to protect intangible cultural heritage on an international level; in the second part, he analyzes nearly all the issues that were the subject of debate during the Convention negotiations. By way of conclusion, he looks at the efforts undertaken on a national level to protect intangible cultural expressions and analyzes Mexico’s standpoint vis-à-vis the Convention, whose adoption has translated into significant progress in the codification of international laws and substantially broadened its scope in terms of the protection of cultural heritage, from the right to sustainable development and self-determination of peoples to the rights of minorities.