States have a duty to ensure “diverging voices” are heard within every community, UN special rapporteur for cultural rights Farida Shaheed has said.

Speaking at a conference in Galway on arts and human rights, Ms Shaheed defined cultural rights as meaning that “everyone can simultaneously belong to multiple, diverse and changing communities”.

The Pakistani sociologist and feminist human rights activist said she believed it was important that individuals were not forced to have one single identity as in “being female, or of a particular ethnic, religious or linguistic background”.

Ms Shaheed, who was keynote speaker at the summer school hosted by NUI Galway’s Irish Centre for Human Rights, said cultural rights included “the right to decide what is cultural heritage”.

This included “what to keep, what to transform and what to get rid of altogether”.

“The importance of cultural heritage is not so much in what happened in the past, but how we interpret the paths today as pathways to the future,”she said.

Whereas cultural rights were often seen as an impediment to women’s rights, the “critical issue” is “how to arrive at a point at which women own both their culture (and religion and tradition) and their human rights”, she said.

Ms Shaheed referred to the power of culture to “heal”, and said that too often artistic expressions and cultural manifestations were seen as a “luxury”.

Cultural expressions are “an absolute necessity for humanity – it is what makes us human”, she said.

She expressed concern about the “over-commercialisation” of public spaces, and displacement of artistic expression by “advertising”.

Irish Centre for Human Rights director Prof Michael O’Flaherty, who is hosting the summer school with Hunt Museum curator Dr Dominique Bouchard, said the three-day event would “provide a platform for sharing ideas and identifying synergies between the two disciplines of art and human rights, both of which are strongly aligned with issues such as social justice, cultural expression and cultural freedom”.

As part of the summer school, an exhibition of photography commissioned by Unesco in 1949 opens on Friday in the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas in Galway.

The exhibition toured internationally in the aftermath of the second World War, and aimed to build awareness and understanding of human rights – following on from adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Images demonstrating perceptions of human rights today also form part of the exhibition, which is entitled The Changing Face of Human Rights.

Irish Times picture editor Frank Miller, artist Paul Seawright, and NUIG Huston school of film director Prof Rod Stoneman were judges for the contemporary images selected.

The exhibition, which runs until July 24th in tandem with the Galway International Arts Festival opening next week, is on display at the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas, Galway, from 10am to 5pm.

Entry is free, and visitors are invited to make a small donation for “church upkeep”.