Cultural Rights in Motion: Legal Invisibility, Forced Migration, and the Limits of Universality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper rethinks the place of cultural rights in international human rights law through the lens of forced displacement. While cultural rights are increasingly referenced in legal discourse, they remain fragmented, weakly justiciable, and structurally sidelined, especially in refugee and asylum regimes. Drawing on critical frameworks of intersectionality and epistemic justice, the paper builds on the concept of cultural displacement to capture the loss of collective identity, memory, and belonging resulting from forced mobility. It shows how dominant legal paradigms, anchored in liberal individualism, abstract universality, and Western epistemologies, erase or depoliticize cultural harm by treating displaced persons as atomized rights holders rather than as members of relational and culturally embedded communities. Through a critical reading of judgments issued by international and regional courts, the article exposes the hierarchies of recognition that govern whose culture is rendered legible and whose remains invisible. It argues for a pluralist and situated approach to universality, one that affirms cultural rights as both individual and collective, symbolic and material, and essential to the legal and political agency in contexts of displacement. In doing so, it calls for a reconfiguration of international law's normative foundations, toward more inclusive and decolonial imaginaries of justice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.120 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.015 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".