The aim of the article is to analyse UNESCO conventions dealing with culture and assess the visibility and importance of cultural heritage education in these conventions and their implementation. First, it briefly presents the role of UNESCO in the area of culture and education, together with the UN Agenda 2030 and the challenges faced currently. Next, it discusses the existing UNESCO cultural conventions and their educational dimension with reference to the conventions’ provisions and aims. Each convention refers to education in the activities undertaken by States Parties, providing various tools and measures tailored to the scope of the convention. The article concludes that despite a lack of synergy and creation of education-related programs in convention-related siloes, UNESCO has managed to create a uniform and evolving system of educational measures aimed at various stakeholders and focus on various levels of awareness. Cultural heritage education is an imminent part of activities undertaken within States’ obligations and should involve various stakeholders, building networks and existing in synergy with other actions or campaigns based on different conventions.

Resumen: Este artículo presenta la política en materia educativa del Consejo de Europa, indicando sus principales características e hitos, a la hora de tratar las cuestiones relativas al patrimonio cultural. En primer lugar, ofrece un análisis de los documentos estratégicos (como, por ejemplo, la Recomendación (98) 5 del Comité de Ministros a los Estados miembro, relativa a la Pedagogía del Patrimonio), con especial énfasis en Convenio marco del Consejo de Europa sobre el valor del patrimonio cultural para la sociedad (Convenio de Faro). La noción de un patrimonio cultural europeo común, como un recurso compartido y no renovado, es presentada en este trabajo, tomando como punto de vista la perspectiva de los derechos humanos. Además, en la investigación se presta especial atención al diálogo intercultural y su papel como sostenedor de la identidad cultural europea. La segunda parte estudia los vínculos existentes entre el Consejo de Europa y las políticas de la Unión Europea. Se dedica especial atención a los programas conjuntos con la Unión Europea, como los compartidos con la Comisión Europea DG GROW, DG-REGIO o Routes4U. Igualmente, se tratan los vínculos entre los convenios culturales de la UNESCO y la política estructural del Consejo de Europa en la materia. Finalmente, el artículo expone una serie de conclusiones relevantes en torno a las sinergias existentes entre las políticas de la Unión Europea y las del Consejo de Europa en la materia, contestando a la cuestión relativa a la razón de su importancia en el ámbito de la educación en materia de patrimonio cultural. Palabras clave: Patrimonio cultural, educación, Consejo de Europa, sinergia, convenios

Cultural security is a comprehensive notion that has gained much attention in the recent cultural heritage debates. In terms of the EU, it encapsulates cultural heritage destruction and protection in armed conflicts, post-war cultural heritage management, restitution, illicit traffic of cultural property, cultural diversity, and intercultural dialogue. The article aims to present how cultural security matters appear in the EU legal system and policy. The authors argue that cultural security is present in different policies regarding cultural property and the fight against illicit trafficking, as well as in EU external cultural relations. Digitization in the cultural sector constitutes a challenge, facilitates access to cultural heritage, and is an important tool for future cultural security. Therefore, EU law in the context of cultural security is analyzed. The authors took the Polish law as an example of how cultural security can be safeguarded while promoting an EU Member State’s jurisdiction. The paper’s educational part offers some ideas on creating and incorporating law and cultural security courses into varied higher education programs.

The 2003 UNESCO Convention definition of intangible cultural heritage (ICH) covers religious practices and rites, as can be seen from normative descriptions and dozens of actual examples, many of which are Catholic religious traditions. The Traditional Latin Mass (TLM), practiced in one form or another for over 1500 years by an ever-increasing number of peoples and nations and in possession of a common stable set of rules, meets the UNESCO criteria for listing as ICH; in fact, it is arguably the best possible example. It is also a complicated one. After the Catholic Church’s liturgical reform in the 1960s and 1970s, new rites were introduced and the old rites were officially abandoned; nevertheless, a minority of clergy and laity continued to celebrate the TLM, and, over time, the legitimacy of their attachment to it was recognised by several popes, who also spoke regularly of the great value of the Church’s cultural and artistic patrimony and recommended that it remained joined with its religious origins. In contrast, the current pope, Francis, has recently become opposed to the continuation of the old rites. Be this as it may, it is quite possible that such a threatened but deeply appreciated international ICH as the TLM could be proposed for listing by several states that (unlike the Holy See) have signed the Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, to give it a recognition appropriate to its immense historical and present-day cultural value.

In studying the performance of academic systems, one often tries to find out—by inspecting some well-defined parameters—how specific changes in the legal system influence the volume and quality of desired outputs, such as publications, patents, or alumni. This mechanistic approach neglects the fact that the main actors in this spectacle are not passive, but have their own priorities, and actively self-organize in response to any changes in their professional environment. In this contribution, we investigate such collective social behavior using the data for academic promotions in Poland in the years 2011 to 2020. Focusing on degrees higher than the PhD, we analyzed over 12,500 habilitation (= higher doctorate) and over 3,000 professorship applications, extracting personal data on academic promotion panel membership along with official roles on the panels. These details were then linked with data on the personal make-up of three consecutive terms of the central body overseeing academic promotions in Poland, Centralna Komisja do Spraw Stopni i Tytułów (“Central Board for Degrees and Titles”). As a result, we were able to identify a privileged group of individuals who controlled a substantial majority of academic promotions beyond the PhD degree by virtue of being part of the Central Board. We found that this relatively small group of academics held dominant control over academic promotions by repeatedly serving on promotion panels. Thus, despite the well-meaning intentions of the reformists who had designed it, the Polish system of academic promotions in the past decade can hardly be regarded as based on pure merit.

The paper deals with the problem of digital restitution of art to post-colonial and postdependency countries. A new model of digital restitution composed of two elements: creation of a digital copy with a NFT attached and creation of new property right in a physical and digital object has been proposed. A system of balances between the rights and duties based on the prior user concept has been developed.