View them here

Two remarkable issues at first sight:
- Buenos Aires and Majuli haven't been discussed as there were more than 45 proposals (and they ranked 46 and 47 on priority)
- ICOMOS/IUCN were much tougher on the sites than the WHC: they recommended 19 sites for inscription, while 27 were finally added

I have suggested before that we should try to identify on the Decisions dB where the ICOMOS/IUCN recommendations weren't followed - in either direction! It is clear that the advisory bodies are trying to use objective criteria which don't take full account of the "softer"/political aspects which WHC want to be used. Also the WHC is subject to peer pressure aspects - just look at the Japanese success last year compared with its failure this. The Japanese newspapers put this down entirely to the fact that last year they had a member on the WHC who was able to get the ICOMOS recommendation ignored whereas , this year they didn't.

Re going back and looking at past recommendations and actuals. Are there any volunteers to help! If we shared out the "years" to volunteers we would cover the job more quickly. I would suggest also that we start with the more recent ones working back as the minutes and documentation is, I feel more "complete". Best for someone to do 1 year to discover what can happen and how best to record it in a fomr which els can record on the dB?

I'm about half way logging the decisions of 2008, and IUCN/ICOMOS seem to be more vulnerable to management and integrity issues (even happened to the Monarch Butterfly Site!)

We should look for an example of this for 2008 - which advice of IUCN or ICOMOS was turned around by the WHC, while the country involved was part of the Committee.

Yep I think I could have a go at looking through a few years. Should be quite an interesting excercise.

I note that annex 2 of the document regarding "Universal Value" among this year's papers
http://whc.unesco.org/download.cfm?id_document=9975

has a spreadsheet format containing the Property number (which could act as a key for easy upload Els!!) showing, inter alia, the criteria
a. specified by the nominating party
b. suggested by the Advisory body (including none -eg reject,defer)
c. adopted for inscription
For CULTURAL properties only - tthere may be a similar doument in IUCN's part of the document but I haven't found it yet (there is a simpler analysis on page 75 of different overall recommendations, rather than details about criteria, over the last 10 years only). In any case Cultural Properites represent by far the biggest %age of inscriptions of course

This by implication provides a record of cases where (b) was a rejection/deferral etc and (c) was an inscription. ie it seems to provide a record of where the WHC DID NOT agree with the Advisory body and went ahead with inscription.
Since the list only covers inscribed sites in their year of inscription it doesn't provide any examples of where the Advisory Body recommended inscription but the WHC rejected/deferred this (whether there are any I don't know)

Before we set of doing any work I think we need to clarify
a. What information already exists in a useful form
b. What situations have occurred
c. What levle of detail we are trying to capture/Els can hold on her dB. (I thnik the differences in criteria are worth holding if you can!

The Iwami Ginzan Silver Mine stands out quite nicely from last year with an Advisory body receommendation of deferral and a WHC inscription on criteria ii,iii,iv. A second level analysis might be to find out which countries were on the WHC when the Advisory Body's recommendation wasn't followed!!

I can recommend this document by the way - though it IS a "long read"!!

PS Els - Annex 3 lists all natural sites rejected/withdrawn - this contains some sites not included in our earlier work on Decisions. I don't fully understand why - though 1 reason is sites withdrawn before they came to the Bureau or WHC and therefore not included in minutes/papers

In my opinion, the strangest thing in the report is Israel site. Gate at Tel Dan is recommended to be inscribed but turn out to be disappearing completely from the new list. I think WHC must do something tricky since both Baha'i and Tel Dan are qualified to be WHS, but this will against the rule that only one cultural site per year per state, so WHC choose Baha'i for 2008! and Tel Dan for 2009! with automatic approved?? If this is true, we have encountered the new trick for nomination strategy.

I also wonder what happened to the Gate of Tel Dan.

According to the updated Operational Guidelines (2008), it IS possible again to nominate 2 cultural sites per country in one year (guideline 61 A: "leaving the State Party the decision of the nature of the nomination ... as per its national priorities").

Israel also is a member of the World Heritage Committee at the moment, so that should have helped.

I recently stumbled upon the solution to this mystery. Apparently a part of the proposed buffer zone to the Tel Dan is in the Golan Heights claimed by Syria. The buffer zone needs to be changed accordingly for the next attempt which will be the fourth one for this site.