PARIS, NOVEMBER 25 – Italy was elected today in Paris to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee where it held a seat for the last time in 2001. The vote took place during the current session of the General Assembly of the member states of the Convention for the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. The Committee is composed of 21 states, in rotation, out of the 194 that have joined the Unesco Convention. Italy will serve for four years as the length of the mandate was recently reduced to encourage the widest participation of member States.
Italy had been absent from the Committee for twenty years; its previous mandate was for the period 1997-2001. The elections for the partial renewal of the Committee took place in Paris this morning at the 23rd General Assembly of the States Parties, on the sidelines of the 41st General Conference of UNESCO.
Along with Greece and Belgium, Italy was a candidate in Electoral Group I (Western European and North American States) following the end of the mandate of Norway and Spain, and was elected in the first round with a very large margin of consensus from the Member States.
“This very important result” said Minister Di Maio “which rewards the work carried out by the Foreign Ministry, by our Permanent Representation to UNESCO, and by our whole network in close collaboration with the Ministry of Culture, crowns our traditional commitment to the protection of cultural and natural heritage and calls on us to further intensify international cooperation, in order to respond adequately to the global challenges which threaten that heritage and to pass it on to future generations”. The new result follows Italy’s election to the UNESCO Executive Council at the previous General Conference and to the numerous inscriptions that were added to the List last July – meaning that Italy is now the country with the greatest number of inscribed sites (58) and making us more and more a partner of absolute pre-eminence for UNESCO”. (@OnuItalia)
