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Shabalala, Dalindyebo --- "The impact of commercial advertising and marketing practices on the enjoyment of cultural rights – Report 2014 (A/69/286)" [2017] ELECD 1433; in Belder, Lucky; Porsdam, Helle (eds), "Negotiating Cultural Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 161

Book Title: Negotiating Cultural Rights

Editor(s): Belder, Lucky; Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781786435415

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: The impact of commercial advertising and marketing practices on the enjoyment of cultural rights – Report 2014 (A/69/286)

Author(s): Shabalala, Dalindyebo

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

When reading the report of the Special Rapporteur (SR), one of the striking frames she uses is the idea that cultural rights are exercised within a community. While she notes that these are exercised both individually and in community with others, similar to other expressive rights such as the right to free expression, I believe that this report and others by her, rightly emphasize the peculiar communitarian nature of cultural rights. Culture does not and cannot exist outside the commune, is created by and with the commune, and has value only because it is shared with the commune. Thus we are concerned about the nature and the health of that commune. I argue that this is what is at the core of the SR’s justification: that those actors with undue power use the force of advertising to impose a specific narrative and set of cultural preferences on the citizens of the commune. It is this that justifies, she argues addressing the issue in the cultural rights context and in the context of paragraph 9(b) of the original mandate. In particular she points to the threat this poses to: cultural diversity; cultural freedom; and freedom of thought and opinion. How these threats are manifested is one of the things that the SR struggles with and I think may not have been altogether successful in delineating, and I address the issue of definition of harms later.