ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the international legal framework against the destruction of heritage in peacetime. It focuses particularly on two international standard-setting instruments: the 1972 World Heritage Convention (WHC) and the 2003 UNESCO Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage (2003a Declaration). The WHC sets out basic legal obligations protecting heritage sites and monuments and forbids states from taking action that would harm heritage in another state's territory. It left a glaring gap, however: whether states could willingly destroy heritage located in their own territory. The assumption that states would not want to destroy cultural heritage in their own territories was upended by the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in 2001, which triggered the adoption of the 2003 Declaration. This chapter examines the two instruments, and queries the assumption in international law that the destruction of heritage is always wrong, and its impacts on communities living in, with, and around heritage. I argue that while the legal presumption against destruction may be important to protect (vulnerable) communities' interests over their own heritage, it can also trap those same communities in a conservation paradigm that is antithetical to the idea of heritage as living culture.
