文化权利运动旨在让人们注意保护人权中关于文化自由的权利，是人权运动中关注个体权利的一部分。
文化权利是与艺术和文化相关的权利，在大多数情况下都被允许。 这些权利的目标是保证个体和群体能够拥有文化，能够自主选择自己参与的文化。文化权利旨在确保所有个体在平等的人格尊严和没有歧视的条件下享受文化部分的人权。它们是与语言等主题相关的权利：文化艺术创作、参与文化生活、文化遗产、知识产权、著作权、少数民族文化保留等。Gregory Paul Meyjes提出了可交互的文化交流，而不是将文化保护作为目的的本身，更多地关注文化群体之间“生态”关系的实现，作为公平互动的条件和有机文化变革的能力。 民族文化和跨文化主义——他将社会和制度政策定义为在机构，群体，法律效力范围下，监管机构或政策限制范围内寻求适应少数群体及其成员的文化特定权利和态度的社会和制度政策。 或有关社会的普遍化问题。
Cultural rights of groups focus on such things as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies that are in danger of disappearing. Cultural rights include a group’s ability to preserve its way of life, such as child rearing, continuation of language, and security of its economic base in the nation, which it is located. The related notion of indigenous (IPR) has arisen in attempt to conserve each society’s culture base and essentially prevent ethnocide.
The cultural rights movement has been popularized because much traditional cultural knowledge has commercial value, like ethno-medicine, cosmetics, cultivated plants, foods, folklore, arts, crafts, songs, dances, costumes, and rituals. Studying ancient cultures may reveal evidence about the history of the human race and shed more light on our origin and successive cultural development. However, the study, sharing and commercialization of such cultural aspects can be hard to achieve without infringing upon the cultural rights of those who are a part of that culture.
Cultural rights should be taken into consideration also by local policies. In that sense, the Agenda 21 for culture, the first document with worldwide mission that advocates establishing the groundwork of an undertaking by cities and local governments for cultural development, includes as cultural rights as one of the principles and states: “”.
"Cultural rights are vested not in individuals but in groups, such as religious and ethnic minorities and indigenous societies." All cultures are brought up differently, therefore cultural rights include a group's ability to preserve its culture, to raise its children in the ways it forebears, to continue its language, and to not be deprived of its economic base by the nation in which it is located." Anthropologists sometimes choose not to study some cultures beliefs and rights, because they believe that it may cause misbehavior, and they choose not to turn against different diversities of cultures. Although anthropologists sometimes do turn away from studying different cultures they still depend a lot on what they study at different archaeological sites.