Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) General Conference adopted the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage. Through this Convention, the State Parties recognized that the duty of ensuring the identification, protection, conservation, presentation, and transmission to future generations of the cultural and natural heritage situated in its national territory belongs primarily to the state. Cultural heritage are monuments, buildings, and similar structures which are of outstanding universal value from the point of view of history, art, or science, or sites or areas which are of outstanding value from a historical, aesthetic, ethnological, or anthropological point of view. Natural heritage include those natural features which are of outstanding universal value from the aesthetic or scientific point of view. The Convention also establishes the World Heritage Committee within UNESCO, which shall create (based on submissions of the States) and maintain the World Heritage List, a list of properties forming part of the cultural and natural heritage. The World Heritage Committee shall also maintain a "list of Word Heritage in Danger."