This article explores the interplay between climate change and cultural heritage, in particular the intangible aspects of cultural heritage, in international legal frameworks, either existing or under development. The prime focus of the current climate change regime of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, leaving certain aspects of cultural heritage rather on the sidelines of debate and policy. However, where climate change combines with generally weak law and policy for culture and traditions, countries vulnerable to climate change may face significant cultural loss in the years to come.

In its inventory of present and contemplated legal protection options, this article draws particular attention to policymaking directed at shaping a “rights-based” system in the form of sui generis rights, to complement any existing intellectual property-based protection. If adequately motivated, indigenous people have a key role to play not only in observing change, but also in developing adaptive models to cope.

The 2009 Bolivian Constitution significantly changed the structure of the state and paved the way for the creation of regional, local, and even indigenous autonomies. These autonomies are charged with the management of archaeological sites and museums within their territory. This article answers the question of who currently owns the Bolivian past, it stems from concerns raised at the 2011 renewal hearing of the Memorandum of Understanding preventing the import of illicit Bolivian antiquities into the United States. By combining an analysis of recent legal changes related to the creation of the autonomies and a short discussion of a notable case study of local management of a Bolivian archaeological site, this article offers a basic summary of the legal framework in which Bolivian archaeology and heritage management functions and some preliminary recommendations for governments and professionals wishing to work with Bolivian authorities at the state and local level.

Shortly after the 2003 American invasion of Iraq, Kanan Makiya, a long time Iraqi dissident and professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, uncovered a major trove of documents belonging to Saddam Hussein's Baath Party and his security forces. The documents proved highly important in reflecting the inner workings of the Baath Party system in his final years in power. Soon after the discovery of the documents, the Iraq Memory Foundation (IMF), a private Washington, D.C.–based group founded by Makiya, took custody of the records, later depositing them with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University to provide a safe haven for them. The deal ignited immediate international controversy and charges of pillage from some Iraqi officials, archival organizations, scholars, and others who also demanded their immediate return to the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad. On the surface, these charges of theft and plunder appear plausible enough, but on examination, a different and complicated narrative emerges in light of the conventions of war, U.S. law, and the Iraqi penal code, as well as the chain of events surrounding their taking and removal by nonstate actors in the Iraqi theatre of war and occupation.

There are apparently two legal systems of “rights ownership” in Ghana, which are (1) the individuals' rights—a system that overemphasizes the exclusive protection of the individual musicians' rights to ownership, and (2) the communal or governmental rights—a system that provides an exclusive protection of the government's (or community's) rights to ownership. Thus, for while the first are the inalienable rights that empower the autonomous musician universally, and are seen as a “private property” of mutually independent individuals; the second are the inalienable rights that empower the collective rights of the community/government, which are seen as a “public property” for a group, with cultural, communal or linguistic rights; systems that are contrary to the Akan systems of right ownership. My aim in this essay contest is to discuss the Akan “individual-communal” dual-relationship with respect to ownership that embraces these two seemingly unrelated concepts of “rights-ownership.”

In July 2006, after 77 years at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm, the 134 year-old G'psgolox totem pole was welcomed home to Kitimaat on British Columbia's northwest coast by the Haisla First Nation. The event was important not only because it was among the first voluntary repatriations by a foreign museum of a cultural artifact to a North American aboriginal community, but also because it marked the end of a negotiation process that had been long and challenging and yet ultimately, according to the parties involved, mutually beneficial and restorative.

Two court decisions highlight divergent opinions as to what constitutes a “substantial burden” on the practice of traditional indigenous religions in the United States. One decision, in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, effectively defines the term in such a way as to discriminate against indigenous religious practices; the other, by a district court in the 10th Circuit based on other holdings by that circuit court, gives much more latitude for protecting such practices and the landscapes they often involve.