Cablegate: Usunesco: Preliminary Draft Convention Wto

This record is a partial extract of the original cable. The full text of the original cable is not available.

UNCLAS PARIS 006482

SIPDIS

FROM USMISSION UNESCO
IO/UNESCO FOR JANE COWLEY

E.O. 12958: N/A
TAGS: SCUL ETRD FR EU CJAN UNESCO UNESCO
SUBJECT: USUNESCO: PRELIMINARY DRAFT CONVENTION WTO
WILL HAVE EQUAL LEGAL STANDING, SAYS FRENCH TV 5
DIRECTOR

1. Following is a rough translation of excerpts
from an op-ed piece by a Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the
President and Director General of TV 5, a French
broadcast TV station. Aillagon is also a former
Minister of Culture. The op-ed piece appears in the
21 September edition of Le Figaro, a right-of-center
major French daily. (Comment. This piece seems to
be part of an effort to inculcate the impression in
the public at large that UNESCO preliminary draft
Cultural Diversity Convention would, if adopted,
supercede current international trade law. End
comment.)

2. Begin rough translation.

In several days, the General Conference of UNESCO is
going to discuss the preliminary draft convention on
the protection of the diversity of cultural contents
and artistic expressions. Let UNESCO seize the
occasion ("Puisse l'UNESCO saisir l'occasion") to,
at long last, furnish an incontestable juridical
base to the defense of the cultural exception, a
base which other accords, such as the WTO, could not
(successfully) challenge except, of course, for the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Between the Fall 2003 General Conference and this
one, an immense task has been completed. It
concluded a task that I had started, in my capacity
as Minister of Culture and Communication, together
with Sheila Copps, at that time the Canadian
Minister of Patrimony. In this battle, we put
together a coalition of our counterpart Ministers of
Culture, who are now united within an international
network on cultural policy. .

I presented on 29 August 2002 to the (French)
Council of Ministers a statement putting this battle
at the center of engagement of the French government
and of my ministry. It is this objective that drove
us to impose the protection of cultural diversity
into the draft European Constitution. Later, at the
beginning of 2004, this statement was the most
important theme in a memorandum of the French
government about cultural cooperation in Europe..

End rough translation of excerpts.

Oliver

1.

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