Meeting of Chairpersons of Committees of UNESCO’s Cultural Conventions
Her Excellency Sheikha Al Mayassa Bint Hamad Bin Khalifa Al Thani, Chairperson of the 38th Session of the World Heritage Committee, met today with Ambassador José Manuel Rodríguez Cuadros, Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage, and Mr. Mauricio Escanero, Chairperson of the Subsidiary Committee of the Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property (UNESCO, Paris, 1970) . Mr. Francesco Bandarin, Assistant Director General for Culture of UNESCO, also participated in this meeting.
The objective of this meeting of Chairpersons of Committees of UNESCO’s Cultural Conventions was to take the initiative in further strengthening the synergies among all UNESCO’s Cultural Conventions and making sure that, with a holistic vision, these Conventions mutually reinforce each other and act as a unified corpus for the better fulfillment of their complementary goals. This will serve in a meaningful way to provide further momentum to the international community efforts to protect and preserve cultural and natural heritage worldwide.
In this regard, among other possible actions, the Chairpersons agreed to organize a meeting in 2015 with the purpose of exploring ways and means to enhance the convergence of efforts of UNESCO’s Cultural Conventions, which could feed into the debates that are shaping the Post-2015 Development Agenda at the United Nations, in which the linkage between Culture and Development should be fully recognized and projected forward.
