Cultural Rights in Motion: Legal Invisibility, Forced Migration, and the Limits of Universality

This paper rethinks the place of cultural rights in international human rights law through the lens of forced displacement. While cultural rights are increasingly referenced in legal discourse, they remain fragmented, weakly justiciable, and structurally sidelined, especially in refugee and asylum regimes. Drawing on critical frameworks of intersectionality and epistemic justice, the paper builds on the concept of cultural displacement to capture the loss of collective identity, memory, and belonging resulting from forced mobility. It shows how dominant legal paradigms, anchored in liberal individualism, abstract universality, and Western epistemologies, erase or depoliticize cultural harm by treating displaced persons as atomized rights holders rather than as members of relational and culturally embedded communities. Through a critical reading of judgments issued by international and regional courts, the article exposes the hierarchies of recognition that govern whose culture is rendered legible and whose remains invisible. It argues for a pluralist and situated approach to universality, one that affirms cultural rights as both individual and collective, symbolic and material, and essential to the legal and political agency in contexts of displacement. In doing so, it calls for a reconfiguration of international law's normative foundations, toward more inclusive and decolonial imaginaries of justice.