European Human Rights Dimension of the Online Access to Cultural Heritage in Times of the COVID-19 Outbreak

The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized that “everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits”. As a result, cultural rights have been understood as inseparable from human rights and require protection mechanisms within particular international (including regional) legal systems. The European continent is proud to have developed one of the most effective mechanisms of the human rights protection by establishing the Council of Europe and adopting the European Court of Human Rights. The recent outbreak of the COVID-19 reformulated many concepts of access to human rights and possibilities to enjoy freedoms. Even if access to culture (access to cultural heritage) has been available online for many years, it is the time of globally occurring lockdowns that forced people to stay home and found themselves in a situation when all of a sudden online access to culture became the only way of access to culture. The article aims to analyze the current situation in Europe by asking questions if and how online access to culture is recognized and protected under the Council of Europe’s mechanisms with special emphasis on the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights in this field.