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It is obvious from the lack of legal mechanisms enforcing the provisions of the existing conventions tackling cultural issues that there is need to adopt more binding instruments on the international level to preserve what could be labeled as “culture” in every state around the globe. Yet, for some reason, it seems that the international community is lacking behind when it comes to either the adoption of new binding legal conventions or even making the existing conventions binding upon the states that signed and ratified these treaties. It is a sad reality that one has to acknowledge when dealing with what could be called “cultural disasters” which refers to situations in which entire cultures, a part of certain culture or even a particular cultural elements have vanished as a result of a lack of international binding mechanism protecting these treasures for the future generations. Indeed, what is the point of having a convention like the UNESCO convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage if such treaty lacks the existence of a dispute settlement system as well as an efficient sanction mechanism? One can not ignore that the convention contains important provisions such as Article 4 stating that: “Each State Party to this Convention recognizes that the duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage....and situated on its territory, belongs primarily to that State. It will do all it can to this end, to the utmost of its own resources and, where appropriate, with any international assistance and co-operation, in particular, financial, artistic, scientific and technical, which it may be able to obtain.” Yet, at the same time, there are no ways through which this provision could be used for instance for protecting cultural elements such as a cultural site or object. In the chapter, “China Meets Hollywood at WTO: Janus Faces of Freedom: Standards of Right and Wrong Between National and International Moralities”, the author Christophe Germann examined this dilemma. In fact, the author tried to show the importance of creating such binding mechanism by providing a comparative analysis between the currently existing international treaties governing culture and the ones tackling trade, in particular, the multilateral trade system. Throughout the analysis, it was obvious that the current international culture law cannot remain the same if the international community is indeed serious in its attempts at protecting the cultures worldwide. In fact, the analysis has shown the primacy of trade law over cultural law as a result of the development of international trade law through the years by the international community but which was driven by states interests as the primary reason for such fast evolution. In contrast, international culture law did not witness similar development pattern due to the fact that governments were less interested in developing a highly sophisticated and binding cultural law in the first place.
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