Professor Bennoune Presents Report to UN Human Rights Council

Professor Karima Bennoune, acting in her capacity as the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights, presented her latest report to the UN Human Rights Council on February 22-23. The full text is available here.

In her third report to the Human Rights Council, Bennoune addressed how actions in the field of arts and culture can make significant contributions towards creating, developing, and maintaining societies in which all human rights are increasingly realized. The report made particular calls for respect for artistic freedom, protection of artists, the release of those jailed for artistic and cultural work, and adequate funding for the arts and culture.

She also presented a report on cultural rights and the protection of cultural heritage in Serbia and Kosovo, looking at all that was destroyed during the conflict and rioting of 1999 and 2004 and calling for mutual respect for all cultural heritages there.

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 UN Special Rapporteur in the field of cultural rights. She was recently presented with the 2016 Rights and Leadership Award by IANGEL, the International Action Network for Gender Equity & Law.