The European European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education (CULT) has adopted a resolution calling to help the cultural heritage sector to recover after the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, more funding to boost digitisation and preservation of cultural heritage is needed.
The resolution was adopted on Wednesday 28 October 2020 with 26 votes in favour, none against and 3 abstentions.
“Cultural heritage is a source of wealth that promotes creativity and innovation that the EU so desperately needs. The European Year of Cultural Heritage has been a remarkable success, but we need to continue building on its legacy. This includes the establishment of a permanent pan-EU platform for bringing together all the relevant stakeholders and increased focus on protecting and promoting digital cultural heritage”, said the rapporteur Dace Melbārde (ECR, LV) after the vote.
The resolution asks for:
- Comprehensive analysis by the Commission on the impact of the pandemic to the cultural heritage sector
- Adequate financial support by the Commission and the Member States to alleviate the crisis to the sectors and the people employed in them
- Request to the Commission concerning the setting-up of a single EU portal, bringing together information from all the EU programmes funding cultural heritage
- Creation of a permanent platform, with organised civil society at its core, for cooperation and coordination on cultural heritage policies at the EU level
- Update of Commission’s 2011 recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material, in order to reflect the technological progress and challenges of the past decade
- Doubling of the Creative Europe programme in the next long-term budget, tripling of the budget for Erasmus+ which also enables mobility of apprentices, more funding for heritage research in Horizon Europe, as well as continued support to the digitisation projects via the European agricultural fund for rural development (ERDF)
- To consider investment in cultural and sustainable tourism infrastructure small-scale and eligible for ERDF support, if the co-financing does not exceed EUR 10 million, and raise the ceiling to EUR 20 million if infrastructure is considered to be world cultural heritage
- Commission should consider organizing another European Year of Cultural heritage in the future
Source: European Parliament press release.
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