1. Introduction
The international protection of cultural heritage emerged in the twentieth century as a response to the massive destruction and looting of cultural property during armed conflicts. The 1954 Hague Convention was the first comprehensive international legal instrument to structurally codify such protection, emphasizing the duty of states to respect and preserve cultural property in times of war.Footnote 1 This framework was progressively expanded to peacetime contexts. The 1970 UNESCO Convention addressed the illicit trade of cultural property, while the 1972 World Heritage Convention introduced the notion of “heritage of outstanding universal value,” establishing an international regime for the protection of both cultural and natural sites.Footnote 2 Later instruments, such as the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage and the 2005 Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions, broadened the scope of protection to include living traditions, languages, and practices, thus acknowledging that heritage is as much performed and transmitted as it is built or collected.Footnote 3
And yet cultural heritage occupies a paradoxical position within the modern legal imagination. On one hand, it is protected primarily through the language of property: Cultural objects, monuments, and sites are treated as assets to be held, transferred, or safeguarded. Heritage, in this sense, is “owned” by states, institutions, or communities. On the other hand, cultural heritage persistently exceeds the logic of property. It is rarely valued for its economic or possessory worth alone. Instead, it is imbued with collective meaning and embodies human attributes such as identity, memory, and dignity. As such, it functions as a repository of shared history and belonging. Its loss or destruction is, therefore, experienced as a profound violation of the cultural integrity and collective identity of the community to which it belongs.
This tension has been described by Mezey as a defining paradox of cultural heritage law, which simultaneously treats heritage as property subject to ownership and control, and as a repository of collective identity, meaning, and belonging.Footnote 4 This paradox, in turn, points to a deeper problem in the law’s conceptual architecture. By grounding the protection of heritage in ownership, the law renders a collective and relational phenomenon into a domain of exclusive and commodifiable rights, even though it formally distinguishes cultural property from ordinary goods.
Consequently, despite its elevated status and the progressive development of an international legal regime specifically aimed to regulate its protection and management, cultural heritage still lacks its own standing in law as it must be represented by owners or states.
And yet some emerging approaches are extending legal personhood to natural elements including rivers, forests, and ecosystems. So, drawing on such ecocentric legal paradigms, this article analyses the following questions: (1) Could cultural heritage be also recognized as a subject rather than an object of law? (2) What ethical and legal consequences would follow?
This proposal is not prescriptive but analytical in nature. It does not aim to design new legal norms or advocate for immediate policy reform. Rather, it offers a preliminary conceptual and comparative exploration of how cultural heritage might be reimagined as a subject of justice rather than merely an object of protection. The method is therefore interpretive and comparative: It draws on analogies with environmental personhood to consider whether similar reasoning might apply to heritage. By engaging comparative legal philosophy and theories of personhood, the discussion situates cultural heritage within a broader historical evolution of the legal understanding of who (or what) can hold rights and duties.
This discussion is significant for scholars and practitioners of heritage law, cultural policy, and legal philosophy, as it challenges conventional assumptions about the legal treatment of heritage and investigates the ethical and doctrinal consequences of extending legal recognition beyond the human subject. Ultimately, it underscores the urgency of strengthening the law’s capacity to protect not only material objects but also the collective identities and memories they embody.
2. Theoretical and Legal Background
In jurisprudence, legal personhood refers to any “being” who or which bears rights and duties.Footnote 5 Even though legal personhood has been long associated to humanity, technically speaking nonhuman entities can also be—and have been at times—identified as legal persons. The problem is that the determination of legal personhood has long remained an ambiguous and contested process, often grounded in analogies with human beings and their natural attributes. Following such an approach, legal personhood has been extended from human beings to other entities such as business companies.Footnote 6 Still, Dyschkant claims that “lawmakers and judges have not been applying legal personhood correctly” and to fix that “we must divorce legal personhood from humanity.”Footnote 7
From a broader theoretical perspective, this critique resonates with Radin’s influential analysis of property and personhood, which questions the adequacy of treating objects that are closely bound up with identity, dignity, and personhood as fully commodifiable goods.Footnote 8 Accordingly, the question of legal personhood has further evolved, thus expanding beyond anthropocentric boundaries. Some countries have recently extended it to include the rights of nature through judicial and/or legislative recognition. That includes the treatment of wild animals as subjects of rights,Footnote 9 granting rivers legal personhood,Footnote 10 and the recognition of Pachamama (Mother Earth) as a collective subject of public interest with intrinsic rights.Footnote 11 According to Pelizzon, “The isolated nature of these instances may indicate a lack of maturity in relation to RoN [Rights of Nature] considerations in each individual jurisdiction, but, when taken together, they certainly gesture toward a growing global sensibility.”Footnote 12 The rising number of academic studies discussing this matter seems to prove that point.Footnote 13
The recent recognition of natural entities as legal subjects builds upon a philosophical and ethical lineage that challenges the anthropocentric foundations of law. Stone argues that extending legal standing to natural objects is a logical evolution in legal thought, proposing guardianship as a mechanism for representing their interests in a new framework where personhood is reframed as a functional legal construct.Footnote 14 This juridical reimagining is further supported by ethical reflections: Singer grounds moral consideration in the capacity of animals to suffer, thus rejecting speciesism as an arbitrary boundary of justice;Footnote 15 while Regan advances a deontological framework by asserting that animals are subjects possessing psychological abilities and inherent value.Footnote 16 Building on that, Cullinan articulated the notion of “Wild Law,” a system that recognizes nature as a community of subjects rather than a collection of objects.Footnote 17
Within this evolving theoretical landscape, Pietrzykowski offers a comprehensive reformulation of legal personhood that moves “beyond humanism.” He argues that personhood is a functional and normative construct, conferred whenever it serves important moral or institutional purposes rather than reflecting inherent human qualities. Legal subjectivity, in this sense, should reflect relational and ethical significance, acknowledging entities for the roles they play within moral, social, or ecological systems.Footnote 18 Moreover, Pietrzykowski proposes a pluralistic model of personhood, recognizing different degrees and forms of legal status according to the entity’s nature and societal function.Footnote 19 Under this framework, animals, artificial agents, and even ecosystems may each hold distinct bundles of rights and protections.
At the same time, claims that legal personhood can fully displace anthropocentric legal frameworks should be approached with caution. As Stone already noted, the extension of legal standing to nonhuman entities does not abolish human-centered legal reasoning but rather operates through representational mechanisms designed and administered by human institutions. Legal personhood remains a juridical construct embedded within anthropogenic legal systems and continues to rely on human interpretation, enforcement, and guardianship. In this sense, personhood does not eliminate anthropocentrism so much as reconfigure it, extending human legal categories to entities whose interests remain legally intelligible through human mediation.
Overall, the recognition of nature as a legal subject rests on four converging transformations:
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• A moral expansion of standing (from humans to all sentient and living beings)
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• A recognition of the intrinsic value of nature (from a utilitarian resource to an entity with inherent worth)
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• A conceptual flexibility in legal theory (personhood as a representational fiction)
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• A cultural-ecological reorientation of law (from ownership to relationship)
So, the question is: Could some of these principles be also extended to cultural heritage, thus granting it–or, at least, to some of its manifestations–legal personhood?
3. Legal Personhood for Cultural Heritage? A Normative and Ethical Discussion
Assigning legal personhood to cultural heritage is not a completely new perspective. In ancient Greek society and throughout the medieval period, certain sacred spaces—such as temples and churches—were occasionally recognized as entities possessing legal standing or moral status.Footnote 20 Over time, however, this conception of sacred structures as quasi-subjects of law gradually faded, supplanted by a more rigid distinction between persons and property.
As mentioned earlier, contemporary international law provides an extensive framework for the protection of cultural heritage. Such a system, however, largely conceptualizes heritage as an object of protection rather than a subject of rights and none of its conventions confer legal subjectivity upon heritage itself, even though they explicitly recognize its role in sustaining communities and transmitting meaning across generations.Footnote 21 For instance, Article 2(1) of the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage states that “intangible cultural heritage … provides communities, groups and, in some cases, individuals with a sense of identity and continuity.”Footnote 22 Yet cultural heritage continues to be represented and defended through states, communities, or owners rather than as a bearer of rights in its own capacity.
This tension between legal categorization and cultural meaning has sparked debate in academia. Mastalir, for example, noted that cultural objects are legally framed as property while simultaneously bearing social, historical, and moral significance that resists reduction to ownership alone.Footnote 23 O’Keefe observes that “international law protects the material remains of the past not because of their intrinsic qualities, but because of the meanings that societies attach to them.”Footnote 24 Smith similarly argues that “heritage is not a thing, a site, or a place, but a cultural process through which values and meanings are negotiated, affirmed, and contested.”Footnote 25 Likewise, Meskell notes that “World Heritage operates as a moral project: it does not merely conserve sites, but constructs a narrative of collective humanity and shared responsibility.”Footnote 26
Recent human rights–based approaches to cultural heritage have also contributed to rethinking heritage as more than an object of ownership or protection. International human rights bodies increasingly frame cultural heritage as integral to the enjoyment of cultural rights, identity, and human dignity.Footnote 27 As Francioni observes, “the recognition of this human dimension has implications for the further expansion of the concept of ‘heritage’ beyond the material products of creativity to the more complex concept of ‘living culture’, which include the traditions, social structures and processes that permit the production, evolution and transmission of cultural heritage from one generation to another.”Footnote 28 As such, both the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) treat attacks against cultural heritage not merely as property crimes but as serious violations of fundamental human interests.Footnote 29
In parallel, Indigenous rights movements have emphasized relational and custodial understandings of heritage grounded in ancestral, spiritual, and intergenerational connections, often resisting proprietary conceptions altogether.Footnote 30 As a result, in recent years, some legal systems have accepted the recognition of Indigenous sacred natural sites as entities bearing their own legal personality. As Studley demonstrates, where Indigenous cosmologies understand landscapes as animate and ancestral, the attribution of juristic personhood—or analogous legal statuses—both aligns with customary governance and provides an effective means of safeguarding these places as integrated natural and cultural heritage sites.Footnote 31 As a limit, such a practice remains exceptional rather than constituting an established pattern of customary international law, thus reflecting emerging rather than consolidated trends in the global legal imagination.
From these perspectives, heritage is not a passive object but an active participant in social life endowed with a form of “vitality.” This contrast exposes a foundational paradox: While the law protects heritage as an inert possession, cultural and philosophical thought increasingly perceives it as a dynamic entity capable of influencing identities, values, and moral obligations. Acknowledging such vitality calls for reflections on whether heritage should be accorded legal standing, considering the wider jurisprudential shifts that have recognized nature as a legal subject.
In the context of cultural heritage, the relevance of personhood lies not so much in its capacity to transcend anthropocentrism as in its potential to unsettle strictly proprietary frameworks and to articulate legal protection in relational, custodial, and intergenerational terms. Just as rivers, forests, and ecosystems have come to be regarded as entities possessing intrinsic value and standing within certain legal frameworks, heritage too may be reimagined beyond its status as mere property.
This shift would rest on four converging changes in contemporary legal and ethical thought: a moral and symbolic expansion of standing, extending concern to entities that embody collective identity, memory, and meaning; a recognition of intrinsic cultural value, whereby heritage is valued not for its utility or ownership but for its role in sustaining continuity and belonging; a conceptual flexibility in legal theory, which understands personhood as a normative and functional construct designed to protect relational and moral interests; and a relational reorientation of law, moving from frameworks of possession and control toward those grounded in care, interdependence, and stewardship. Seen in this light, the idea of granting legal personhood to heritage is not an abstract extension but a logical continuation of an evolving juridical imagination that increasingly seeks to align law with the relational and symbolic realities it governs.
If cultural heritage were to be recognized as a subject of law, the consequences would be significant. Ethically, such recognition would affirm the moral standing of heritage as more than an instrument of human use, acknowledging its role in embodying collective identity, intergenerational memory, and cultural continuity. Legally, it would require new representational mechanisms—such as guardianship or trusteeship—to give voice to heritage in judicial and administrative processes. It might also reshape doctrines of restitution, conservation, and damage assessment, shifting the focus from property loss to injury to a living community. Pragmatically, it would reframe the human–heritage relationship in terms of responsibility and reciprocity rather than ownership or control. In short, extending legal personhood to heritage would demand that law adapt to a more pluralistic and relational ontology of value, one already emerging in the recognition of the rights of nature.
However, this conceptual shift would also raise significant challenges. First, there is the risk of overextending legal personhood: If every valued entity were to qualify as a “person,” the concept would lose its analytical coherence and normative force, undermining its practical utility. Second, the attribution of personhood to contested heritage could potentially foster instrumental conflicts between states and communities. A state might claim “guardianship” of the heritage legal person, thereby centralizing power rather than decentralizing it to communities. Finally, such recognition could conflict with established principles of ownership and restitution law as questions would inevitably arise about how heritage interests relate to, or diverge from, those of current owners. Collectively, these challenges highlight that reimagining heritage as a legal person would not merely transform existing frameworks of protection but would demand a deeper reconfiguration of the legal understanding of value, agency, and responsibility within the cultural and normative domains.
4. Conclusion
According to Pietrzykowski, “as successive bastions of the many centuries’ long belief in the metaphysical uniqueness of the human being are falling, it is only to be expected that the anthropocentric axiology of law based on it will soon follow.”Footnote 32 In recent years, scholarly debates on the legal personhood of nonhuman entities—ranging from elements of nature to artificial intelligence systems—have intensified, though they remain marked by conceptual divergences and normative controversy. Within this rapidly evolving discourse, reflections on the possible recognition of cultural heritage as a legal person are still in their infancy. Yet such an inquiry is neither speculative nor gratuitous: If the conceptual boundaries of personhood are already expanding beyond the human and into the ecological and technological domains, then the symbolic, relational, and identity-bearing dimensions of heritage equally invite reconsideration.
The present analysis suggests that recognizing cultural heritage as a subject of law is conceptually reasonable though normatively complex. Such recognition would affirm the moral and relational significance of heritage as a carrier of identity and collective memory, extending the logic already applied to natural entities in environmental law. Ethically, it would reframe heritage protection as a matter of justice and reciprocity rather than property management. Legally, it could enhance protection by granting heritage representational standing through guardianship or trusteeship models. Yet this transformation would require careful calibration to avoid overextension of personhood and to balance new forms of representation with existing ownership and restitution frameworks.
Future research could test these theoretical insights through comparative and empirical studies. Possible directions include examining national case law where sacred natural sites have been granted quasi-personhood, exploring models of heritage guardianship, and developing ethical guidelines for representing heritage interests in courts or policy settings. Experimental thought experiments could also be elaborated to illuminate how the symbolic and relational agency of heritage might be translated into meaningful legal practice.
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