Regime for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage: From International Law Perspective

The Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of 2003 is an international convention, therefore it falls into the domain of international law and is considered a part of the regime for the protection of intangible cultural heritage. The regime is a set of norms, rules and behavior patterns that the international community has put forward on the common concerns and expectations about a particular subject. Accordingly, every international step towards the protection of intangible cultural heritage is part of the regime and the 2003 Convention is the most concrete of these steps. In order for a regime to be considered successful the problem must be correctly identified and defined, cause and effect relationship should be correctly established, reachable and meaningful objectives should be determined, practical and result-obtainable solutions should be proposed, the regime must be equipped with the right tools and institutions and states parties must be equally committed. The number of treaties signed in regards to the issue or of states that are party to this regime are not sufficient criteria for success. When evaluating the ICH, dealing with only the convention text and its implementations can be misleading, thus, the regime should be considered as a whole. In the discipline of International law all kinds of decisions, objectives, institutions and processes to ensure the functioning of regimes are called regime mechanisms, and the effectiveness of regimes is evaluated according to these mechanisms. The aim of this article is to evaluate the effectiveness of the ICH Regime with regard to regime mechanisms. For this purpose, mentioned mechanisms are introduced first and then the ICH regime is evaluated in terms of these mechanisms. The results of this research indicate that the ICH regime is equipped with the right tools and institutions. However, there are constraints in the design of the regime which hinder its effectiveness. Even though the definition and diagnosis of the problem is right and legitimate, the regime’s cause-effect relationship and proposed solutions for this problem are open to discussion. When evaluated with regard to international law in general terms, the ICH regime seems to have become a matter of concern and complaint for intellectual states.