The Universal Declaration of Human Rights asserts that `Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community'. As this suggests, the notion of cultural rights is both intuitively appealing and analytically vague. Assertions of cultural rights have gained prominence in both national and international policy contexts. This article considers some of the conceptual challenges, including a potential bias towards reification and traditionalism and the inherently contestable character of claims based on cultural rights. It also suggests a threshold test for identifying violations of cultural rights, and presents some alternatives to a rights-based framework for advancing cultural issues within public policy.