Conflicts And Harmonization Among International Treaties On Intangible Cultural Heritage

As the deepening understanding of intangible cultural heritage, international organizations, mainly United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (hereinafter referred to as "UNESCO") and World Intellectual Property Organization (hereafter referred to as "WIPO"), have built up an international protection system for intangible cultural heritage of international legal documents based on the combination of public and private law concepts.By theoretical and practical analysis, this paper will, firstly, focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage under international law, and figure out the efforts of international organizations in different areas related to such protection, respectively UNESCO, WIPO and WTO; secondly, initiate a horizontal comparison with these legal documents while trying to locate internal conflicts and contradictions within the international protection of intangible cultural heritage, and further provide solutions for the harmonization; finally, raise certain suggestions on the formation of domestic protection system for intangible cultural heritage in China.In spite of the fact that the existing international treaties have built up a protection system for intangible cultural heritage, the said existing international treaties cannot provide a comprehensive protection to intangible heritages in each and every nation due to the special nature of such cultural heritage. Meanwhile, current WTO regime has not made specific provisions on intangible cultural heritage related goods and services, as consequence, acts offering protections in accordance with other legal documents might result in conflicts with WTO rules. Therefore, in order to strengthen the protection of intangible cultural heritage, modifications are to be made with relevant international legislations.For domestic intangible cultural heritage protection system, which remains still in its infancy, it will be necessary to refer to related international legal instruments. Indeed, on one hand, existing international legal instruments have been proven effective after series of discussion and practice; on the other hand, existing international legal instruments are concluded jointly by a number of parties, based on decent international cooperation. Recently an increasing disjunction has revealed between the protection of public law with administrative nature and the needs of market economy, arousing new problem in the protection of intangible cultural heritage. Hence, in order to strengthen the domestic protection system for intangible cultural heritage, works are still to be done, referring to international legislations while taking into consideration the reality in China.