Thursday, 2 July 2009The 33rd session of United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Committee, has begun on the 22nd June in Sevilla, Spain. The session will be end on the 30th June. UNESCO now has 878 sites from 145 countries. In this session new cultural and historical places will be inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List. Nominations of 30 sites will be considered; whereas, some of the existing sites will be removed from the list. Among those new nominations not only cultural and historical but also natural ones are discussed. Governments that offer sites nominated for world heritage status should take the responsibility to maintain these sites' cultural, historical or natural characteristics. In addition, officials should accept that UNESCO World Heritage Committee inspection of the sites periodically.
Some of the sites are on the danger watch-list because of pollution, uncontrolled industrial developments, neglected precautions and natural catastrophes. Istanbul, Dresden and Bordeaux are on the danger list. Dresden is expected to lose its world heritage status hence the cultural landscape of Germany's Dresden Elbe Valley is deformed as a result of a construction of a bridge. The case in the province of Bordeaux is a similar one. And the historical peninsula in Istanbul, where the urban residential transformation projects could not manage maintaining cultural and historical structure of the region, is also under threat of being removed from the list.
Burkina Faso, Cape Verde and Kyrgyzstan are expected to be on the new list. Sulaiman-Too Mountain in the Ferghana Valley is recognized by UNESCO for the first time in Kyrgyzstan history. The sacred Mount Wutai in Shanxi, the historical monuments of Mount Songshan, in Henan, in China will also probably on the new list.
The official decision of UNESCO will be announced by the end of the session. More detailed information and historical improvements on the issues of world heritage can be obtained from the official web site of UNESCO World Heritage Centre (http://whc.unesco.org/).
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Thursday, 2 July 2009
Muge Akpinar(JTW)
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