On the role of artistic freedoms in protecting fundamental human rights

This was a paper written to be spoken at the Human Rights Conference 2020: Lawyers without Borders Student Division Aberdeen University, March 2020. It was accompanied by 15 Power point slides, which cannot be reproduced in the hard copy paper for reasons of copyright. The paper responds to the question, 'Do artistic freedoms contribute to the protection of fundamental Human Rights'. With examples and with reference to cultural policy research discourse, I argue that the freedoms of 'art' are intimately connected to human rights, and that where human rights are contextualised by 'culture' (and cultural rights) we begin to understand the significance of the 'human' in human rights.