Our Common Dignity – Rights-Based Approaches Working Group (OCD-RBA)

Founded in 2007, OCD-RBA was initially an ICOMOS initiative, which was expanded in 2011 in cooperation with the other Advisory Bodies to the World Heritage Convention (ICCROM and IUCN, in addition to ICOMOS), coordinated by ICOMOS Norway.

Out of this collaborative initiative, the Board of ICOMOS set up the OCD-RBA Working Group, initially consisting of members from Norway, India, South Africa and Australia. The Working Group was motivated by ICOMOS’ desire to further understanding of community engagement and rights and fully integrate this into ICOMOS’ members ethos and work.

What are Our Common Dignity – Rights-Based Approaches’ activities?

ICOMOS is a diverse organisation and the membership of the OCD-RBA working group reflects this, regularly cooperating with other bodies within ICOMOS.

From its inception, the initiative’s – and later, working group’s – main objective was to build awareness of rights issues within heritage management, including World Heritage. Central to this work is the promotion of best practices through the development of tools and guidelines. In terms of World Heritage, this integrated from the tentative list stage, through nominations to conservation and management of sites that are granted World Heritage status. This initial focus on World Heritage sites was expanded to include all types of cultural heritage.

OCD-RBA’s initiatives have included a Declaration in celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as part of the 2018 ICOMOS General Assembly. During this General Assembly, in cooperation with OCD-RBA, the ICOMOS Advisory Committee adopted the Buenos Aires Declaration.

The Buenos Aires declaration encourages ICOMOS members, Committees and groups all to do the following:

• Build strong relationships with the relevant communities and peoples to their work;
• Embrace principles of free, prior and informed consent of communities before adopting measures that concern their cultural heritage;
• Offer all possible assistance to communities and rights holders, so that they may be consulted and invited to participate actively in stewardship and all stages of processes: identification, selection, classification, interpretation, development and safeguarding of cultural heritage.

At the same ICOMOS General Assembly, the OCD-RBA Working Group called on all ICOMOS Committees to showcase how they had been working on participation and cultural heritage conservation. This allowed for a better overview of the integration of rights and OCD-RBA’s work and findings into ICOMOS’ practice.

The significance of OCD-RBA’s work has been recognised, for example by the UN Special Rapporteur in the field of Cultural Rights’ 10th anniversary report.

Join the working group

The OCD-RBA working group and its task teams (Policy, Communications, Webinars and Seminars) is coordinated by Laura Robinson from ICOMOS South Africa.

Join OCD-RBA