Mr Chair,
Mme Special Rapportuer,
On behalf of the Group of Friends for Culture, I thank the Special Rapporteur for her timely and valuable report.
We fully recognize that cultural rights are an integral part of universal human rights and are essential to human dignity, participation, and inclusion. We must ensure that culture remains high on the global development agenda.
The report’s focus on indicators is therefore particularly important.
As has long been recognized since ancient times, the art of measurement is inseparable from the art of governance: only by establishing a true measure can societies identify what must be protected, and advance toward the common good.
Effective indicators can help governments monitor progress, identify gaps, and strengthen the integration of culture and cultural rights into national and global development agendas. In this regard, we welcome the report’s emphasis on building on existing frameworks, including those developed by UNESCO, and on strengthening cooperation and knowledge-sharing to avoid duplication and improve evidence-based policymaking.
As we look toward the next stage and the post-2030 development agenda, robust evidence on the implementation of cultural rights will be essential to ensuring that culture receives the recognition it deserves within sustainable development efforts. The recent proclamation by the General Assembly of the International Decade of Culture for Sustainable Development (2027-2036) offers a timely opportunity to take this work forward.
In this context, I would like to ask the Special Rapporteur: How can Member States best align national monitoring frameworks with the emerging international work on culture indicators, to ensure comparability, including with UNESCO’s efforts to develop common methodologies and metrics, while ensuring that these indicators remain adaptable to diverse national contexts and priorities and adequately capture both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of cultural rights?
Thank you.
