World Heritage Sites and Indigenous Peoples' Rights: An Introduction (original) (raw)

'The UNESCO World Heritage Convention, 1972–2012: Reflections and Directions', 2011 12 (text)

The Historic Environment: Ploicy and Practice, 2012

The World Heritage Convention celebrates its fortieth anniversary in 2012. In 1972, the key words were environment and protection; today, key agendas are sustainable development, climate change and culture. The Convention identifies sites for conservation according to academically derived criteria of outstanding universal value. Since 1972, the motivation for inscription has shifted from cultural recognition to economic gain. In addition, the United Nations operates to a progressive set of radical, inclusive agendas. This article reflects on the achievements and future directions for the Convention, focusing especially on cities.

World heritage sites and indigenous people's rights

2014

This book includes twenty case studies of World Heritage sites from around the world that explore, from a human rights perspective, indigenous peoples’ experiences with World Heritage sites and with the processes of the World Heritage Convention. The book will serve as a resource for indigenous peoples, World Heritage site managers and UNESCO, as well as academics, and will contribute to discussions about what changes or actions are needed to ensure that World Heritage sites can play a consistently positive role for indigenous peoples, in line with the spirit of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

UNESCO’s World Heritage Convention at 40

Current Anthropology, 2013

The year 2012 marked the fortieth anniversary of UNESCO's 1972 Convention concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. It remains the major international instrument for safeguarding the world's heritage. The Convention's most significant feature is its integration of the concepts of nature conservation and preservation of cultural properties in a single treaty. Recognizing the increasing threats to natural and cultural sites, coupled with traditional conservation challenges, it was established as a new provision for the collective protection of heritage with outstanding universal value. This paper identifies three critical challenges that the World Heritage Convention faces today. Each of these has implications for how the international community chooses to identify, reify, protect, and promote something called "World Heritage" as a privileged category. These are the mounting challenges to expert opinions and decision making, the increasing and overt politicization of the World Heritage Committee, and UNESCO's fiscal crisis exacerbated by the recent US financial withdrawal. Lynn Meskell is Professor and Director of the Stanford Archaeology Center, Stanford University (Main Quad, Building 50, Stanford, California 94305, U.S.A. [lmeskell@stanford.edu]). Electronically published 30 V 13.

UNESCO, World Heritage, and Human Rights Compliance

Duke Global Working Paper Paper 44 • December 2021, 2021

This whitepaper provides a legal analysis to align the 1972 World Heritage Convention and the UNESCO Constitution and its commitment to human rights and fundamental freedoms. It sets out recommendations for UNESCO, the World Heritage governing bodies, and States Parties to ensure properties on the World Heritage List and Tentative Lists are not sites of serious, systematic violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law.

Heritage Conservation-Concept and Dimensions

According to the sites ranked by country, Italy is home to the greatest number of World Heritage Sites with 51 sites, followed by China (48), Spain (44), France (41), Germany (40), Mexico (33),and India (3). While there are 32 World Heritage Sites in India that are recognized by UNESCO as of 2014 and out of them 25 are cultural sites, and the other 7 are natural sites. They include Kaziranga wild life sanctuary,

Four decades of World Natural Heritage – how changing protected area values influence the UNESCO label

DIE ERDE – Journal of the Geographical Society of Berlin, 2015

Since the launch of the World Heritage Convention in 1972, World Heritage sites have become increasingly popular. To date, more than 1000 sites have received World Heritage status, among them 228 natural and mixed sites. Yet too, in the past four decades, protected area paradigms have evolved from rather strict and exclusionary to more integrative approaches. Nevertheless, relatively little is known on how such developments influence World Natural Heritage (WNH) sites. This paper presents the results of a global survey of 128 of 211 WNH sites listed in 2011 and analyses the results by taking the year of inscription as a reference. The article shows that the understanding of WNH status has undergone great changes: from being perceived as an internationally valued instrument to foster conservation, WNH status has now rather become a label of great promotional importance. This can, e.g., be shown by a decreasing influence of WNH status on the status of protection of a site. Conversely,...