UNPO has submitted evidence to UN Special Rapporteur Alexandra Xanthaki in response to her call for inputs on assessing the implementation of cultural rights, ahead of her report to the UN General Assembly in October 2026.
Most cultural rights monitoring assumes a starting point that is out of reach for many of the world’s communities: a state that acknowledges their existence, a legal framework that applies to them, and reporting mechanisms they can access. For unrepresented and stateless peoples, none of these conditions can be taken for granted. The result is a gap between international cultural rights standards and lived realities, where violations are often structural, systemic, and largely invisible to current assessment tools. UNPO’s submission draws on testimony from member communities across Asia, Africa and Europe to argue that this gap cannot be closed without fundamentally rethinking how cultural rights implementation is measured.
The submission draws on evidence from member communities including the Khmer Krom, the Crimean Tatars, the Kabyle, the Annobonese, the Assyrians, the Tibetans, the Jumma peoples, the Naga peoples, the Catalans, and the peoples of Southern Mongolia, East Turkestan and Western Togoland. Through their testimonies, the submission documents how denial of legal recognition, linguistic suppression, land alienation, and the criminalisation of cultural identity operate together to hollow out cultural rights in practice. It also challenges the assumption that participation in cultural governance is meaningful simply by its existence, arguing that state-controlled processes can extract and institutionalise communities’ cultural knowledge while erasing their political agency.
The submission is grounded in UNPO’s core conviction: that for peoples denied a seat at the table of national and international governance, cultural rights are inseparable from the broader question of self-determination. Any framework that does not account for this risks overlooking the people that need the most cultural rights protection.
UNPO urges the Special Rapporteur to incorporate the following principles into her assessment framework:
- Recognise self-identification and community self-reporting as legitimate means of rights claiming and data collection
- Treat legal recognition as a structural precondition for cultural rights protection, and assess not only whether recognition exists but whether it is meaningfully enforced
- Establish further structural indicators such as legal standing of customary governance institutions, land and resource rights with cultural dimensions, and absence of laws that criminalise cultural organisation
- Establish process indicators such as availability of mother-tongue education, community authority of cultural institutions, and community consent in heritage nominations
- Establish outcome indicators such as intergenerational transmission rate and freedom from criminalisation of cultural expression
- Distinguish between meaningful and performative participation, ensuring that assessment indicators capture who controls cultural governance processes, not merely whether they exist
- Design a standalone cultural goal around indicators of cultural agency and self-determination, capable of being populated through community-generated evidence in contexts of occupation displacement, or acute repression
