At the meeting of the United Nations World Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development, MONDIACULT 2022, held in Mexico City at the end of September, the ministers of culture of 150 UNESCO member states unanimously adopted a declaration recognising culture as a ‘global public good’ and a common roadmap for strengthening public cultural policies and cultural diversity.
This declaration is a diplomatic success that owes much to the commitment of Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, to the mobilisation of NGOs including the International Federation of Coalitions for Cultural Diversity (IFCCD) to which the French Coalition belongs, and to the responsibility of the Ministers of Culture present.
The Coalition supports the commitments of this Declaration, which resonate with its current concerns: the protection and promotion of artistic freedom and freedom of expression, support for the diversity of cultural works and linguistic diversity, guaranteeing the social and economic rights of artists and culture professionals, strengthening the mobility of artists, strengthening the protection of intellectual property, etc.
The ministers’ appeal is also in line with two important orientations for culture in Europe: On the one hand, it defends the need to preserve and strengthen the financing of creation and culture, and on the other hand, it aims to improve the regulation of digital platforms everywhere in order to realise the full potential of the digital transformation of our societies and to avert the risks arising from insufficient regulation of algorithms or artificial intelligence and from the unequal concentration of global cultural platforms.
Finally, the Declaration rightly emphasises the extent to which culture can be a powerful vector for resilience, social inclusion, sustainable development and economic growth.
In the face of the contemporary challenges facing culture, the Coalition calls on UNESCO, all States, and in particular the European Union and France, to act quickly to implement the commitments of this Declaration in cultural policies and to work, at the international level, on two major projects: the creation, within the framework of UNESCO, of a World Forum on Cultural Policies to bring multilateralism to life and the participation of culture professionals; the inclusion of culture as a specific objective in its own right in UNESCO’s next Sustainable Development Goals.
PDF version: 2022_10_06_MONDIACULT_2022_La_CFDC_salue_l-adoption_de_la_declaration_pour_la_culture
Press contact for France:
Agnès Mazet – 01 40 23 45 11 – agnes.mazet@sacd.fr
Press contact for international:
Guillaume Prieur – contact@coalitionfrancaise.org – www.coalitionfrancaise.org