The International Criminal Court (ICC) has brought about a watershed and sent a strong message in favour of the protection of cultural heritage. Cultural monuments and cultural heritage sites give people roots as well as an identity. Their destruction is therefore also an attack on the dignity and faith of society, extinguishing a part of humanity’s shared cultural consciousness forever. The perpetrators inflict economic and, above all, serious psychological harm on a community. People in Timbuktu and in the whole of Mali are to receive compensation.

Protection of the world’s cultural heritage remains a considerable challenge for us in conflict-ridden times such as these, and all sections of the international community must therefore pull in the same direction. I called for this back in 2015 when I was President of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee. During my term of office, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee strongly condemned the destruction of world cultural heritage as a potential war crime in the Bonn Declaration. In response to our joint initiative with Iraq, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2015 stating that the destruction of world cultural heritage could not be justified by any religion and should be regarded as a war crime. These decisions played a major role in bringing about the ICC proceedings.

At the session of the World Heritage Committee in Bonn in 2015, I presented the special prize of the UNESCO Director-General to the masons of Timbuktu for their work in restoring destroyed buildings. It was a moving moment: without the dedication of masons in Mali, the reconstruction of the mausoleums destroyed by radical Islamists would not have been possible and this world cultural heritage would have been lost forever.