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New Zealand will on Saturday host its first World Heritage Committee annual meeting to consider more than 40 nominations from around the world for new heritage sites - but will not put forward any of its own.
Instead, it will only submit a tentative list - sites it
may nominate for World Heritage listing sometime in the future.
New Zealand has only three World Heritage sites listed, the Tongariro National Park (1990), South West New Zealand World Heritage Area (1990) and the Sub-Antarctic Islands (1998).
The 31st session of the body will take place in Christchurch from June 23 to July 2 chaired by Tuwharetoa paramount chief Tumu te Heuheu, this country's World Heritage representative.
Other speakers will include the Governor-General, Anand Satyanand, and the Unesco director-general, Koichiro Matsuura, whose organisation adopted the World Heritage Convention in 1972 as a way to encourage the preservation of the world's most outstanding cultural and natural heritage sites.
Over 600 international delegates are expected to attend but the meeting will be closed to the public as they decide whether nominated sites will attain World Heritage list status.
Australia is nominating the Sydney Opera House.
Britain did nominate Charles Darwin's former home in southeast London, but withdrew it at the last minute, saying Unesco's adviser, the International Council on Monuments and Sites, had failed to recognise the Bromley property's "significance as a site for the heritage of science".
Down House was Darwin's home for 40 years and was where he developed his theory of evolution. The BBC reported that Britain now hoped to submit a revised nomination in January 2009.
Japan will put forward its sacred Mt Fuji for the list of tentative candidates for heritage status, but observers say a potential handicap is the tonnes of trash dumped in the forests around the foot of the volcano's graceful slopes.
CNN reported that the sorry state of Japan's most-heralded mountain could be a stumbling block in Japan's campaign to get the United Nations to list Fuji as a World Heritage site.
Long a site of worship and the subject of poetry and paintings - perhaps best exemplified by Katsuhika Hokusai's famous 19th century woodblock print Great Wave off Kanagawa - Fuji has a unique place in Japanese culture.
The Kuwait Times reports that the World Cultural and Natural Heritage Arab Committee's concerns at the New Zealand meeting are for locations already registered but which are in danger, including Abu Mmina (Egypt), Ashoor (Iraq) and the historical Zbeid (Yemen).
India is pushing for listing of the Red Fort, a magnificent 17th-century red stone structure in Delhi where mutinous soldiers proclaimed the frail Mughal Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as ruler of India in May 1857.
- NZPA
