This is a little update on what UNESCO's Executive Board decided last
week regarding its Memory of the World programme.
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| To speak during UNESCO''s debates, delegates from Member States need to show their name plates vertically. |
First of all, what is the Memory of the World
programme? It is the guardian of what I call UNESCO’s “world heritage list for
documents”, officially called the Memory of the World Register. This register
is a list of documents that are so unique and important for humanity that the
international community decided to inscribe them on an official list
administrated by a UN Agency (UNESCO). Examples of documents inscribed on that
list are Anne Frank’s Diaries, the first films ever made (by the Lumière
Brothers) and the largest medieval world map, the Hereford Mappa Mundi.
What’s special about this documentary heritage list is
that any NGO or person, including you and me, can contact UNESCO to nominate a
document! (read also this link). This the big difference with UNESCO’s World Heritage List for natural
and cultural world heritage sites: only governments can nominate items for that
prestigious list.
With this in mind you might now want to know how your significant document could become a UNESCO document. The
procedure is as follows:
Firstly you fill out a
form you can find on UNESCO’s website and you send it to UNESCO.
Secondly if UNESCO thinks your document
has the potential to be inscribed on the Register it’s submitted to a small committee
of 9 experts. They study all proposals, make a pre-selection and then submit
this pre-selection to a bigger committee of 14 experts that manages the
programme: the International Advisory Committee (IAC).
Thirdly the IAC discusses
the pre-selection, adjusts it if necessary, and submits their selection proposal
to UNESCO’s Director-General.
Fourthly the
Director-General makes the final choice and decides which documents will be
inscribed. The Director-General mostly accepts the selection proposal he or she
receives from the IAC.
This nomination process is exactly what UNESCO’s Executive
Board discussed last week. Starting point was the fact that this process is
currently being revised by the IAC. For example the IAC will try to improve
this process by making it more transparent
(to show why some documents make it to the register while others don’t). It will also try to
find a solution for sensitive items,
like documents that describe controversial events that occurred during a
military conflict (how should these items be dealt with?). In total 15 aspects
of the nomination process will be revised, as described in this Executive Board
document: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002443/244357e.pdf.
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| UNESCO's Headquarters in Paris where debates take place. It has three legs, which originally hosted the sectors for education, culture and science. |
The Executive Board took the following decision.
Firstly it welcomed the
review process led by IAC experts. This confirms the special character of the Memory
of the World programme which distinguishes it from UNESCO’s World Heritage programme:
it’s not managed by governments (like the World Heritage Committee which is
composed of governments) but by the 18 experts that form the IAC.
Secondly it asks UNESCO to
present the outcome of the revision process to the Member States and to keep
them informed in the meantime. This means that governments will have the
opportunity to appreciate the improvements to the programme that IAC experts
will propose. This will happen during the Executive Board session in the Spring
of 2017, after the Memory of the World Summit in Abu Dhabi in January 2017.
Here's the text of UNESCO's Executive Board decision: http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002443/244358e.pdf
