Cultural Destruction and Mass Atrocity Crimes: Strengthening Protection of Intangible Cultural Heritage

Attacks against or affecting cultural heritage have been prosecuted exclusively as war crimes at both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Court. However, this jurisprudence has limited the very concept of cultural heritage to solely tangible or physical manifestations of culture, excluding the numerous intangible cultural expressions of a given collective. This has precluded a constitutive link between attacks on cultural elements and crimes against humanity and genocide, and ignored the myriad ways in which the destruction of cultural heritage can adversely affect protected groups, including the disintegration of their collective identity. The rights of minority and indigenous populations such as the Uighurs in China can be better protected if acts damaging culture, including intangible cultural heritage, are inherently linked to crimes against humanity and genocide as this will compel states to better acknowledge, address, and prevent these crimes, in line with their obligations under the Responsibility to Protect.