Professor Bennoune addresses cultural rights at arts-and-culture summit in Canada

Professor Karima Bennoune delivered one of the keynote addresses at the Cultural Summit of the Americas in Ottawa, Canada.

The summit brought together leaders in public funding of arts and culture from throughout the Americas.

Bennoune spoke about cultural rights, in an address that asked, “How can we support and invest in the arts and culture to create and sustain conditions for people to have the freedom to meaningfully choose, participate in and contribute to cultural life, free from discrimination?”

Karima Bennoune is an author, lecturer, teacher, and international law scholar as well as the first Arab-American to be honored with the Derrick A. Bell Award from the Section on Minority Groups of the Association of American Law Schools. In 2014, she was awarded the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for her book Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight against Muslim Fundamentalism, now available in paperback from W.W. Norton & Company. In October 2015, she was appointed U.N. Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights.