Collective cultural claims before the international court of justice

In the aftermath of the Second World War, when the system of the United
Nations was created, granting rights to collectivities was not a United Na-
tions priority. Collective rights, and, a fortiori, the right of groups ‘to protect
and develop their own particular cultural characteristics’1 were, at that time,
seen as a peril to the establishment of the international human rights sys-
tem. ‘Groups’ meant division, discord, conflict, and disparity. Ultimately, they
meant war. Hence, affirming different cultural identities with an imprecise
scope, nature and boundaries, and discriminating among individuals on the
basis of their belonging to a group, was considered something inherently con-
tradictory to human rights. In addition, as the former Director-General of
unesco Koichiro Matsuura observes, the meaning of the word ‘culture’ back
in the 1945 would refer to arts and the letters, rather than to a group right ‘to
be different’.2