Last month, the inaugural Federation of International Human Rights Museums conference took place in Liverpool (see link below).
This new body brings together museums and other organisations from around the world to share practice and work collaboratively, but also to look at the ways that institutions can challenge contemporary forms of racism, discrimination and human rights abuses.
It is obvious that museums dealing with subjects such as slavery, human rights and the Holocaust would see it as their mission to educate and campaign on these issues.
What point is there in a Holocaust museum, after all, if not to help prevent future genocide? But what about museums that don’t cover such subjects? Should they also be campaigning bodies?
To answer this question, it is vital to understand that human rights abuses don’t just take place abroad. It would be safe and complacent to think so.
The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that everyone has the right to participate freely in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
Museums should ask whether that is what happens in their local communities. If members of your community are being excluded – economically, intellectually or socially – from your collections and buildings, don’t you have a duty to do something about it?
People are often willing to sign up to a broad idea of human rights, but then shy away from confronting specific abuses on their own doorstep. We should strive to make sure the same cannot be said of museums.
Sharon Heal, editor
sharon@museumsassociation.org
www.twitter.com/sharonheal
www.museumsassociation.org
- The discussion about museums as campaigning organisations will be continued at the Museums Association’s conference in Manchester, 4-6 October, with a keynote address from Victoria Dickenson of the Canadian Museum for Human Rights and a session on museums and human rights. Click here for more information
- Museums Journal October 2010, news, p11