Speech of Minister Gilberto Gil at the First Session of the Intergovernmental Committee of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions

OTTAWA, CANADA - DECEMBER 11th, 2007

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, Gilbert Laurin. Thank you, Mme. Françoise Riviere, Assistant Director-General for Culture of UNESCO. Thank you, Mr. Georges Anastassopoulos, President of the General Conference of UNESCO. Thank all the other members of the table, officials of the Canadian Government, Ladies and Gentlemen representing UNESCO member states and culture-related authorities:

Let me first thank Canada for making available the simultaneous translation in Portuguese. Let me also congratulate Canada for Mr. Laurin`s election for the presidency of this committee.

It is a great pleasure to represent my Country, Brazil, in this First Session of the Intergovernmental Committee of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions. On behalf of the Brazilian delegation, I would like to thank the Canadian Government for the gentle hospitality.

I am aware that we are sharing a great responsibility with the member states of this Committee when launching the foundations and operational guidelines for the effective application of the Articles of the Convention. When signing and ratifying the Convention, our countries reasserted the sovereign right to formulate and implement their own cultural policies and adopt measures to protect and promote cultural diversity. Thus, the parameters and procedures debated in this forum should not aim only to facilitate this process, they should also strengthen the cultural policies in each country.

This is the moment for us to affirm and consolidate culture as a central axis of development, at local, regional and global levels. International exchange and cooperation allow us to mutually reveal and know our diversities, and in this way, enhance the wealth of our countries while contributing to the development of every nation.

In this context, Brazil reaffirms the importance of creating a Cultural Diversity Fund and demonstrates its interest in allocating resources to it. — while always searching for solutions that allow us to overcome budgetary limitations. Thus, the Fund should essentially be designed in such way to respect each country’s autonomy and reality. It is necessary to propose multiple formulas of national contribution. And also from within the private sector, especially involving companies responsible for cultural hegemony in cultural markets. However, in addition to guaranteeing access to and use of this Fund, it is also necessary not to limit the Convention’s impact on the actions of the Fund itself. The Fund is only one mechanism to achieve the Convention’s goals.

In this sense, Mr. Chairperson, for us, the greatest contribution of the Convention is its strong regulatory role, supported by Articles 6 and 7. Its power to regulate and strengthen cultural dissemination within our countries and at global level also empowers our open and dynamic societies. Beyond the possibilities for cooperation, the spirit of the Convention makes us recognize that culture cannot be negotiated only according to the rules of international organizations that regulate trade and intellectual property. The complexity of the symbolic systems and cultural expressions of a population cannot be addressed simply as trade goods. For this purpose, we, governments and States, need to fight for parallel conventions in negotiations that occur simultaneously in other international forums. Otherwise, everything we gain with this Convention may be lost in other forums if new treaties suppress cultural rights and authorize hegemony in cultural markets.

In Brazil, for instance, the national cinema industry achieved only a 13% domestic market share in 2005 and we have limited access to productions from the diverse countries of the world, many of them signatory members to this Convention. Situations of economic hegemony occur, I believe, in almost all our countries. The Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions should support public policies, so together we could modify these figures, by strengthening and modifying the way cultural assets are debated in other forums. For this reason, I mention Articles 20 and 21 of the Convention, which address such concern.

New parameters should be created to actually promote access to cultural expressions from all over the world, to protect the symbolic systems and cultural expressions that are vulnerable or threatened by extinction and to promote the strengthening of the cultural industries of developing countries. We should promote cultural industries on a multilateral and balanced basis, in a world with many centers of content production, based on permanent exchanges, with fair global allocation of revenues.

For this purpose, we should keep betting on the mobilization and political power that the fight for the Convention has already generated and can still spark worldwide, with the attraction and support of new countries and new cultural, institutional and social players. In this sense, I would like to point out that in Brazil, the Article 6.2.h of the Convention has been a useful instrument, necessary for the support of new public cultural policies, such as the recent creation of an independent public TV network, something we did not have in Brazil before.

Additionally, the Convention has been important for strengthening the Ministry of Culture itself, in Brazil. Besides restructuring our policies and instruments for diversity, cultural heritage and the promotion and financing of culture, we recently launched a government program named “Mais Cultura” (meaning ˝More Culture˝), which includes culture in the government’s priorities, as a fundamental right of 190 million Brazilians. This is the first time Brazil has recognized that culture is essential to fight poverty and generate full citizenship. Over US$ 2.5 billion will be invested by 2010, based on this new role of the State as declared by this Convention that we are working with today.

The Convention consolidates cultural rights at the level of an international juridical framework and shows the States the need to be prepared to ensure such rights. Contemporaneous states, with long-term budget and planning capability. It is no longer possible to consider only one State model in the form of a single culture of democracy or any other political system. We should strengthen States that support civil society in its full diversity of expressions and create permanent methods of participation in public policy formulation. A State that promotes increasing autonomy and sustainability of cultural groups by recognizing them and granting access to the technologies that our societies have developed.

Mr. Chairman, we need to build comprehensive policies to eliminate an exclusive focus on conventional arts. In order to serve the society as a whole, we must include popular forms that reflect the concept of diversity through its many manifestations and symbolic systems, as recognized in Article 4.1 of the Convention.

We should conceive cultural polices that strengthen cultural capabilities, and beyond that, contribute to the educational system as a whole, ensuring a wide cultural repertoire to promote high quality education in our countries, according to Articles 1.f and 10 of the Convention.

It is necessary to fortify public communications systems, digital television and radio broadcast, aiming at a high level of production of cultural content that represents the cultural diversity of humanity, while respecting the multiple symbolic systems and manifestations that identify various communities, as per aforementioned Article 6.2 of the Convention.

We have to develop the economy of culture as a strategic sector for the promotion and expansion of autonomy and innovation, including a great part of non-industrial cultural economy, as is set down in Articles 6 and 14 of the Convention. Within new regulatory frameworks, small cultural companies should be encouraged and economic monopolies that in effect cause private censorship and restrictions on democracy should be prevented.

We should consider traditional knowledge as technologies essential to our societies. It is necessary to ensure a policy that values traditional knowledge, fights against illicit and unauthorized use or its utilization for commercial purposes, without fair remuneration to populations and community groups with such derived knowledge, as stated in the Convention Preamble.

I remember that at the last General Assembly of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), a Brazilian proposal called the “agenda for development” was approved. Among other points, it urged the organization’s member countries to accelerate their work aimed at providing international protection to traditional cultural expressions and knowledge, which could include the elaboration of a new international instrument foe this purpose. As members of this Convention, we must support that proposal.

Finally, it seems essential to consider copyrights as part of cultural policies. A fair balance between the rights of authors and investors and society must be promoted. Society must have the rights of access and fair use of the intellectual works, based on the current conditions created by the new technologies. In this sense, we propose that UNESCO’s Convention on Cultural Diversity should be also considered by other agencies of the United Nations, such as the World Intellectual Property Organization, when elaborating its treaties and conventions that may affect the possibilities of access to culture, as per Articles 20 and 21 of the Convention.

We, in this Intergovernmental Committee, are in charge of making our agenda move forward, not allowing any back-sliding. In the Brazilian perspective, facing such a challenge means translating the concept of diversity into concrete policies that put into actual practice the principles and guidelines already agreed upon and accepted by over 70 countries that have ratified the Convention. It is in view of this great responsibility that I wish all of us a fruitful work and an excellent job.

Thank you very much!

• Publicado por Carol Lobo/Comunicação Social
• Categoria(s): Discursos
• Tags: convenção da unesco, Diversidade Cultural, ministro Gil