UNESCO’s Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and the ‘goodness criteria’

This paper discusses UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage and specifically the challenges connected to article 2 and the ‘goodness criteria’ included in the Convention’s definition of intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The interpretation of these criteria and the practical implementation of them has proven challenging, and the question of how to handle human rights considerations within the framework of the Convention is an unresolved problem. As the question whether a traditional practice is, for example, discriminatory is often a contentious matter, and as traditional practices sometimes fall within a ‘grey area’, the topic of discrimination tends to be easier to avoid than to address. Another important factor in this is the notion of heritage as ‘good’. In contrast to the World Heritage Convention, the 2003 Convention does not recognise so-called negative, contested or difficult heritage. The inclusion of the goodness criteria can be seen as a fundamentally important statement, assuring that due attention is given to human rights considerations and that discriminatory practices are not to be included. At the same time, the goodness criteria have not been strictly applied, which can be seen, for example, in the handling of gender. In this paper, the author discusses problems related to the current approach to the ‘goodness criteria’, and as a hypothetical exercise, draws up four alternative scenarios.