UNESCO Says U.S. Funding Freeze Won’t Hurt ‘World Heritage’ Applications, But Some Lawmakers Worry

The U.N. cultural agency UNESCO says that the fact the United States is in arrears with its contributions – the result of a funding cutoff in response to its admission of “Palestine” – will have no bearing on pending applications to have several historical sites in the U.S. declared World Heritage sites next year. That confirmation, in an email from Paris early Friday in response to queries, effectively undercuts the arguments being made by some lawmakers who are pushing for an omnibus spending bill being negotiated ahead of a Jan. 15 deadline to include funding for UNESCO’s World Heritage program. Although the U.S. cannot restore funding to UNESCO itself without Congress providing a waiver to the law mandating the cutoff, these lawmakers want a contribution made specifically to its World Heritage program. Their argument: Failure to do so may harm the applications for a number of sites, including Franciscan frontier missions in Texas and Louisiana’s Poverty Point, to be added to the World Heritage list...more