President speech: The role of culture and human rights in promoting human development

“The role of culture and human rights in promoting human development”

The Hon Catherine Branson QC

The Second International Conference on the Inclusive Museum 2009

University of Queensland, 8 July 2009

1 Introduction

• May I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land on which we meet today, the Jagera and Turrbal people, and pay my respects to their elders past and present.
• I would like to begin by thanking the conference organising committee for being so imaginative, not to say courageous, as to invite the President of the Australian Human Rights Commission to provide an opening keynote speech to this international conference on museums. I regard this as a great honour but I have also found it a considerable challenge. 
• Your conference has the theme ‘EnabIing Diversity Sustaining Development’. I must confess that I don’t know enough about museums to know precisely what that means to you, but as a human rights practitioner it has a very familiar ring to me. An important issue facing human rights practitioners, both here in Australia and elsewhere, is how, with our increasingly diverse populations, we can sustain, and indeed improve, our social cohesion.  That is, how can we each maintain our sense of community, of all being bound in some way by a common bond, while respecting the cultural differences of our increasingly diverse population?  To put it even more simply, how can we solve the problems that come when diversity gives rise to a sense of ‘us’ and ‘them’? 
• The thesis that I wish to advance is that far from respect for human rights being a problem in the way of social cohesion, as is sometimes suggested, respect for human rights is critical to social cohesion in diverse societies.
• And, as I will try to explain, I see museums having an important role to play in advancing that respect.

2 The nature of diversity

• Diversity is a complex concept.  I sometimes think about it by imagining someone, perhaps me, walking into a crowded room of strangers.  If I walked into such a room and saw that it was filled largely by Australian men but there were a few women present, being somewhat shy, I would probably identify with the women and approach them first. It would be with them that I would instinctively feel most comfortable – they would be my ‘us’ as opposed to my ‘them’ in that room. But if the men were middle-aged lawyers like me and the women young punk rockers with safety pins through their noses my response would almost certainly be the opposite – my ‘us’ would in this context be the other middle aged, middle class individuals in the room.  We can all imagine variations on this theme.
• This is because diversity has many aspects – it includes things like race, sex, age, sexuality and physical and intellectual characteristics.  But it also includes things like social class, where geographically one lives or comes from, one’s level of education, the experiences both personal and professional that one has had, the nature of one’s family and one’s position in that family.  And it includes culture, language, dress and beliefs. Which of the many aspects of diversity will be uppermost in an individual’s consciousness, or perhaps unconsciousness, at any time will depend upon context.
• But there is more to the complexity of diversity than just its multifaceted nature.  It is not uncommon in modern Australia, and elsewhere, for one individual to identify with more than one culture, whether or not they speak the language of them all.  By way of example, while my own parents are both of British descent, their forebears having arrived in Australia very early in the history of white settlement, my extended family includes members who identify with the Greek and the Chinese cultures.  Additionally we see all the time individuals, often young people, who abandon some aspect of his or her primary culture – perhaps its religion, its rules of personal conduct or its style of dress, while holding on to others.  And more generally cultures are fluid things and, particularly in this age of globalisation, they are diverging.   By way of example, while in Beijing the week before last I was surprised to find the front page of Saturday’s China Daily largely given over to the death of Michael Jackson – and to read there that his ‘legion of Chinese fans wept across the Chinese mainland on Friday as news of his sudden death spread like wildfire’.  I learned that the youth of China is more in tune with modern western pop culture than I am. 

3 What is the role of human rights in promoting inclusion?

• So let me now talk about human rights. When I talk about human rights, I am talking about the fundamental rights and freedoms which all individuals should enjoy in order to live with dignity. In broad terms these rights are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the United Nations in 1948 in the aftermath of the horrors of the World War II.
• Breaches of human rights often lead to alienation and social exclusion. If a person experiences discrimination, is excluded from community activities, is unable to find secure housing, cannot access education, or cannot find employment, they are likely to be pushed to the margins of society and rendered voiceless; they will for most of the community become the ‘them’ in the ‘them’ and ‘us’ dichotomy.
• Enjoyment of human rights is the basis of being able to participate in the community and in decision-making processes that affect our lives.
• And importantly, human rights are not just about the rights of individuals in society. Human rights are also concerned with rights of family, culture and community. The right to protection of the family, the right to freedom of religion and belief, the right to participate in one’s culture, all recognise the centrality of culture, community and identity to well-being and human development.
• Culture, it must be emphasised, is not just about the civilized embellishments of life.  For many communities culture is a metaphorical lifeblood as important, if not more important, than health and wealth. And at the same time, health and wealth can often be improved through cultural maintenance and development.
• The role of culture in promoting human development was comprehensively acknowledged when the UNESCO Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity was adopted in 2001. 
• This statement of principle links cultural heritage to human rights and its foundation document – the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. It recognises the global significance of, and threats to, culture; and the symbiotic relationship between the physical environment, heritage and human rights.
• Recognising this symbiotic relationship, UNESCO has endorsed an integrated model of human development known as ‘sustainable heritage development’. It has been put to practice in the reconstruction of the World Heritage Area of Ha Long Bay in Vietnam, with the effect of reversing poverty and ecological degradation. Local communities are able to establish sustainable businesses, while preserving their culture and improving their collective health status. Ha Long Bay is now an international tourist destination – a floating eco-museum in which traditional activities double as a source of income. In this way, Ha Long Bay residents have improved both their health and their wealth through cultural maintenance and development.
• Australia can learn from this and other examples of an integrated approach to human development. Our approach, generally, is one in which cultural rights tend to take second place to economic participation. However, there is good news. Australia has ratified most of the UNESCO conventions relating to culture, including the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property (1970) and the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (1972).
• The Commission also welcomes the government’s recent announcement that it will ratify the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of Diversity Expressions. In its submission to the government lodged late last year, the Commission noted that the 2005 Convention recognises the right to cultural practice and preservation as a human right, but one that is also linked to sustainable development.
• This is promising. However, the government has not yet indicated whether it will ratify the 2003 Convention Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage, despite the fact that, in many ways, this and the 2005 convention are designed to work in tandem. It is not enough to ratify one without the other.
• Intangible cultural heritage1 is important to all humans – even if they don’t know what it really means – because it is about protecting those cultural qualities that define essential aspects of humanness.  But intangible cultural heritage is critical for any community that is threatened by external forces; these may be Indigenous communities (especially an issue in Australia), diaspora communities (which is also true for our enormous culturally diverse population), and also those Australians who still retain something of our colonial heritage (this is especially true for farming and rural communities).  As I remarked above, when we talk about ‘culture’, it is really this form of culture that we mean – and it is this form of culture that is a critical lifeblood to much of humanity.
• In both submissions prepared by the Commission we noted that cultural heritage belongs to all Australians.  In this sense, these conventions do not privilege certain groups but rather, they recognise that we all have a right to culture and to its protection and promotion.
• A socially inclusive community is one in which the diversity of cultural expressions, ethnicities, faiths and traditions are freely practiced and respected by all members of that community. A community of this kind is one likely to be cohesive, to be a community in which a common bond between members exists. It is likely to be a safe community rather than one in which members fear their neighbours.
• A means of demonstrating respect for diverse cultures is, of course, for them to be adequately and sympathetically reflected in the activities of the nation’s cultural institutions and media.
• In a society as diverse as Australia, human rights principles of respect and participation are a particularly important foundation for fostering greater social cohesion.  This is the idea behind the Commission’s work with Australia’s Muslim communities. Back in 2002 and 2003, the Commission conducted research and consultations to explore the experiences of Arab and Muslim Australians in the post-September 11 climate. The Commission heard that there had been a rise in anti-Arab and anti-Muslim prejudice following the terrorist attacks in the US and the Bali bombings, which was exacerbated by particular national and local events such as public debates over asylum seekers and counter terrorism laws.
• Since that time, the Commission has embarked on a number of projects aimed at enhancing social inclusion of Australia’s Muslim communities as part of its Community Partnerships for Human Rights program, with a particular focus on building more inclusive, harmonious and safer communities, and creating greater awareness of human rights.
• One of these projects is a national community arts and culture initiative aimed at getting Muslim Australians, particularly young Muslim Australians, involved in local arts-based programs that promote understanding of human rights issues. As part of this initiative, the Commission and the Australian Council for the Arts co-funded the annual Arab Film Festival, which was held just last weekend in Sydney. The Festival showcased stories from diverse Arabic-speaking cultures, which, taken as a whole, reflected the complexity and diversity of Arab communities and experiences, and sought to debunk the myth that ‘Arab’ is synonymous with ‘Muslim’.
• Through film, music, and other creative initiatives, art can provide a safe environment for participants to interact and explore the complex social and cultural issues that I would characterise as human rights issues.

4 What is the role of museums in promoting inclusion?

• I wish this morning to suggest, what I suspect many of you already take for granted, that museums can also provide a safe environment of this kind.
• I do not have the audacity to try and define what a museum is to this audience.  But I would like to begin by reflecting on what the word ‘museum’ often conjures in the minds of those who hear it.  I think this helps define possible futures for museums, futures which I believe can play an important role in legitimising diversity.
• When I was young, in Australia, in the 1960s, museums were distinctive spaces and a visit there was a rather solemn occasion.
• Housed in grand buildings – often stone, Victorian edifices, they were packed with collections: stuffed birds and other victims of the taxidermist; dusty artefacts from dead cultures and other trophies of empire; crowded shelves of gemstones and mineral deposits.
• Today museums tend to be quite different places. On a recent visit to Cape Town I was particularly impressed by the District Six Museum.  It could hardly be more different from the museums of my childhood.  There are South African visitors here who will know this museum well but, for the others, let me say just a little about it.  It is, physically, a modest place.  It is appropriate that it should be for its modesty is part of its story.  In 1965 the apartheid government declared Cape Town’s District Six ‘white’ – more than 60,000 people were uprooted and relocated.  The museum now works with the memories and experiences of dispossessed people in exploring diversity, difference, inequality and injustice.  It does so in part by placing its visitors in the community that was District Six. 
• This museum gave me, a visiting Australian, an emotional understanding of the inhumanity of apartheid which no amount of reading could impart.  It helped challenge the ‘them’ and ‘us’ divide (in this case between white and non-white) which can make it so easy to downplay, or fail to empathise with, injustice suffered by others.
• So this modest museum gave me a real sense of how museums can tell and interpret the stories of a nation’s history, both the good bits and the bad, and in ways that help break down the distances between people that are the product of perceptions of ‘them’ and ‘us’.  It also demonstrated to me how, unlike conventional media that often provide quick, inaccurate and biased interpretations of events, museums can take the longer view.  They can be places where we can explore new ideas, where stereotypes can be challenged and where the complexity of diversity can be revealed. 
• Museums have been described as safe spaces where unsafe ideas can be explored. I certainly hope that museums, and their related cultural institutions, will remain at the forefront of how humans understand the complexity of the past, the confusion of the present, and the uncertainty of the future.
• Museums are well placed to tell powerful human rights stories – perhaps about the changing roles of women in society, perhaps about the impact of settlement on indigenous communities, perhaps about an immigrant community’s experience of resettlement – or the asylum seeker fleeing persecution, or the union fighting against the exploitation of its membership, or a community working to save its local built heritage. They can also tell stories that will provide links across cultures and this will, I suspect become easier the more modern cultures diverge.
• As I have mentioned, the best museums enable audiences to be immersed and engaged at deeper, more meaningful, and more emotional levels than is likely to occur through the ephemera of television or print media. This intimate connection developed through stories helps build empathetic understanding of human rights issues. And understanding is critical to respect.

5 Conclusion

• What I have outlined is, of course, a very different concept from the museum of my youth that I described earlier. 
• I am delighted that the International Council of Museum’s strategic plan for 2008-2010 recognises the role of museums in negotiating, reflecting and advocating for a greater understanding of the relationship between the natural and human worlds, the significance of culture, and the role that culture plays in human development.
• May I therefore suggest that respect for human rights – which provides a powerful framework for enabling diversity – will prove a valuable aspect of the values, the policies, and the practices of the 21st century inclusive museum.
• In concluding, I want to thank the conference convenors for allowing me to speak first at this event, thus providing me with an opportunity to emphasise the intersections between culture, human rights and human development within the particular context of the modern – and by that I mean ‘inclusive’ – museum.
• To be truly inclusive, museums must be culturally inclusive.  This inclusivity must transcend the old notions of access and equity; if communities (using this expression as broadly as it will permit) are to be included then the representation of culture is essential.  As I noted earlier, culture is not just the great iconic creations of civilizations. Intangible cultural heritage, so often preserved as a human ‘shy hope in the heart’, is the culture that defines the real identity of most people.  Thus, its preservation is essential to human development and human rights, as well as, a cultural right to rest of humanity.  Culture is the heritage of us all: its preservation is thus a collective right of us all, and its loss a loss to humanity as a whole.