Description

Monuments and buildings have been reconstructed since ancient history. However, reconstruction started to raise normative questions in the 20th century, especially after authenticity became a requirement for inscription in the World Heritage List. It took 30 years from the Venice Charter of 1964 for the international community to find a more flexible approach to questions of authenticity, which was declared in the Nara Document in 1994. Nonetheless, the World Heritage Committee has continuously been called on to assess difficult nominations as societies responded to a number of dramatic changes over the last 20 years. While such changes repeatedly highlighted the need for a new set of normative arrangements to assess matters of authenticity, very little headway was actually made. Against this background, the Nara+20 process (2012 – 2014) was launched in order to identify work plans to revisit these issues. In today’s world, reconstruction and authenticity continue to pose a number of important questions. For example, many heritage monuments and sites were recently destroyed in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. If these State Parties and local communities wish to rebuild these monuments and sites again, how should we approach this? This lecture will examine these developments in the discussion of authenticity in the World Heritage context, and illustrate their contemporary relevance in relation to the World Heritage Convention.

About The Speaker

Toshiyuki Kono is Distinguished Professor, Kyushu University (Fukuoka, Japan). He currently serves as Vice President of the International Council of Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS), an advisory body of UNESCO, a position he has held since 2014, where he is in charge of, among other things, World Heritage issues. In addition, he has been active in UNESCO as an independent expert, where he has served, for example, as Chairperson of the 3rd General Assembly of the State Parties of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010 and Chairperson of the Legal Committee of the 34th UNESCO General Conference in 2007.

His recent publications in the field of international heritage law include “Authenticity, notions and principles” (2014) 4:2 Change over Time 436-460. In the field of private international law, he has given a series of special lectures on the topic of “Efficiency in Private International Law” at the Hague Academy of International Law in 2013, which were published in its Pocket Book series in 2014. Besides his vice-presidency of ICOMOS, he is, inter alia, Vice President and Titular Member of the International Academy of Comparative Law and Chairman of the Committee for Intellectual Property and Private International Law at the International Law Association.