Unesco damaging credibility of world cultural heritage list

At its annual conference in the Brazilian capital of Brasília, the UN cultural organisation Unesco last week conferred the status of World Heritage Site on several places, but only two were in Europe. Unesco is obviously letting itself be guided by political rather than scientific criteria, the conservative daily Dziennik Gazeta Prawna comments: "The criteria may not be easy to define, but one can't avoid the suspicion that the Paris organisation is led more and more by politics and less and less by a neutral assessment of the contributions of individual nations to the development of civilisation. This is happening because it is the representatives of the states who have the final say, rather than independent academics. ... If things carry on like this, soon Vietnam and Argentina will have as many objects on the world's cultural heritage list as France or Italy. But no one will take the list seriously any more."

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