 Thank you very much, and I'm very happy to see so many people around this table and so many people who are interested in Aikamos, UNESCO, and Aikam. That's wonderful. I hope you all become members of Aikam afterwards. I'm going to talk about the role of experts in the context of archaeological world heritage sites, and I'm going to focus on four elements. First the context, the experts and advisors, who are these people, what are the requirements for experts and advisors and the challenges, and there I will try to be a little bit critical because there are some things that you have to know when you are an expert and it's not an easy job. Mostly at the beginning, most people would love to become experts and work in the nominations and on desktop reviews and things like that, and I had so many people asking me hey, that's a wonderful job. How did you get it? How do you do? And it's not that easy at all, and I would like to show you that there are difficulties in it, and it's not the dream job everybody thinks it is. So first of all, let's go into the context. Why does UNESCO need experts and advisors, and what are the rules of the advisory bodies, Aikamos, IUCN, Aikrom, and others? First of all, what does UNESCO and Aikamos want and need? UNESCO needs experts to evaluate the nominations on site and with its desktop reviews. It needs expert consultants for workshops for the development of nominations and management plans. UNESCO needs experts to reevaluate existing management and conservation plans, and it needs experts for the reports on the state of conservation of the nominated properties. That's all official. Yet UNESCO does not have the manpower to do this work, the woman power either. It also wants to be partial, since it is the body which determines the expectation of the nominations throughout the World Heritage Center. So it cannot be judged at the same time that it looks at the objects. UNESCO therefore calls on advisory bodies to do the expertise evaluations for the nominations and other expertise in consultation work, as mentioned before. It works in particular with Aikamos for the monuments and sites and the IUCN for the natural environment nominations. Aikrom centers on training and monitoring the states of conservation and answering requests for international assistance, particularly for built and movable heritage. Aikamos divides its involvement with the UNESCO World Heritage Convention with providing the highest available professional expertise in the evaluation of the World Heritage Nominations and in other aspects of the implementation of the World Heritage Convention, including the promotion of the application of theory, methodology and scientific techniques to the conservation of the architectural and archaeological heritage. That is in the Aikamos policy for expertise mandates that every expert receives before going on a mission. What is an expert? What is the work and who are the people? An expert is a person having a high level of knowledge or skills in a particular subject, and in this case it would be in archaeological management structures, in conservation techniques, in archaeological research of different regions. But not only, he or she should also have the intercultural language or listening skills, since he or she shall play a role as a translator or transmitter of what is needed by the UNESCO on one side and what can be offered by the state parties on the other. Experts are also invited to conference workshops for the follow-up of conventions, guidelines and so on. The expert advisor or consultant is a recognized specialist with particular skills, expertise or knowledge who is contracted by UNESCO, Aikamos or the state party for a short period, either as an advisor or consultant, or to provide and produce a service such as preparation of nominations, reports on the feasibility of future nominations, reports on re-evaluation of management plans, and the reports on the state party. Consultants may also be asked to organize workshops for capacity building either by UNESCO World Heritage Center or by Aikamos or IUCN or EECOM, who are these experts and advisors. Officially, all persons involved in the process of evaluation of nominations, state of conservation reports, reactive monitoring and other missions and programs. It also includes experts consulted by the Board of Aikamos to evaluate the organization work in the area of World Heritage of their own employees and the work of expert evaluators, so experts may even evaluate the work of experts. That's how it works. The experts are chosen amongst the list established by the different communities of Aikamos, Aikom and IUCN based on the working curricula of their members and upon recommendation of the committees of these bodies. What are the requirements for an expert? Well, there are extrinsic requirements and intrinsic requirements. The extrinsic count the knowledge of how UNESCO and Aikamos and Aikom and IUCN function. What are their strategies and their roles in the development of the nominations? A consultant and expert should always inform himself or herself about current developments. You have to have the knowledge of management structures, not only in a theoretical basis, but also through practice. You have to have a knowledge of politics and the social and economic situation of the state parties, which is also very good if you want to understand how the nominations are made. You have to have the knowledge of the history or prehistory of the nomination or the site of consultation, which means lots of work before going, doing a report or going on the sites. General knowledge of history of the place is essential. Intrinsic requirements include inter and transcultural competencies, which are necessary to understand the particular situation of each case, which leads to a certain adaptability. You have to be able to be very mobile. The world changes and it changes quickly. The governments change, the institutional structures may change. This does not facilitate the analysis of nominations since these are based on a long-term work. Do not imagine that a nomination takes less than three years time. It seriously takes much more. So whatever is written three years ago may not be the thing that is presented to you at the moment of the nomination. One must be able to understand these changes and adapt the inherent analysis strategies. You have to be diplomatic. You have to have language competencies. French and English are the obligatory languages. But if you know other languages, it's always a plus. It depends on where you go. I have a story about Moldova. I know a little bit of Spanish and a little bit of Italian. With my French knowledge, we were walking around the sites in Moldova. We went to see some villagers and discussed. The accompanying people were there and they were translating to English. If you know Romanian has also a Latin language, sometimes you understand certain things. And then, of course, listening to it and translating came to English. I don't think that's what he said. Could you please repeat again? So if you understand the language that's being spoken, among the people who are in the villages in the community, it is a real plus to understand what's behind the whole nomination. You have to have listening skills. You have to listen to very, very well, not only what the people are saying to you directly, but also what is understood, but what they are saying. You have to be empathetic, curious, and have a great dose of good sense. That means very adaptable also to every situation. You have to have a great motivation. You're not supposed to be tired all the time. You have to really understand what it is. You have to be in the subject as much as your colleagues are going to be in the subject. And you have to be integral and have an ethical awareness. That is very, very important. And finally, but not least, good physical condition. You never know where you're going to land. So individual experience also plays a crucial role. More you are in it, more you understand how the things work, more you can do better. Now, what is the place of the expert advisor in a larger context? Experts are mediators, translators and transmitters. If you take the figure showing the larger context of government as proposed by David Kennedy, the expert is located between the layman and community and the representatives of power. They are in the background of the relation between the context and the demonstration, the foreground. Although never present in political or public life, never taking decisions and developing regulations, the expert plays an enormous role in defining laws, interpreting the past, and the way the historical and archaeological sites can be protected, usually in an informal way and sometimes even having a great influence in market strategies concerning the sites he or she is working on. A sort of silent power. This particular position leads us to think of challenges inherent to the position of experts and his or her role in the context of World Heritage Sites. So keep in mind this sort of table here. You're always behind. You're never in front. Anyway, you're not allowed to talk to the press or whatever as an expert on-site or whatever. What you know is something that you will have to give back to ECOMOS and which will be given to UNESCO also after approval. So you're always in the background, but you have an enormous power because whatever you say or whatever you write on all these themes is going to be taken in account for the development afterwards, the acceptance or the refusal of nomination or whatever plan or management plan or conservation, whatever you say is going to be very important. So what are the challenges? Different challenges come to us. The least we can say is that the experts play a very important role in the international NGOs. And therefore we can talk about the authorized heritage discourse as determined by Laura Jane Smith in 2006, which determines the context of which heritage exists. It defines what heritage is, which heritage is worth protecting and how it should be protected. In the case of World Heritage, these notions are defined by the World Heritage Convention and the operational guidelines giving it a normative character. This official discourse gives the experts legitimacy and importance. International legislation and conventions entrench this discourse and reinforce the particular position of the expert advisor. Thus the first challenge for an expert is to understand the importance of your authorized heritage discourse in his own work and translate it for the representatives of power on one side and the local communities on the other. Due to the fact that the world of archaeologists and other heritage specialists is quite small and that the power of the expert may sometimes exceed the competencies of the state parties, representatives of power or the basic common knowledge of the local communities, conflicts of interest is a great danger for the international NGOs. And the end is a great danger. The international NGOs have made a particular effort to control. To answer this problem, ECOMOS bases its evaluations on different scientific opinions and on peer reviews. Even if the national committees are consulted, the evaluation process is done by experts and no link to the state parties are concerned. Experts who participate in any step concerning a nomination or report on the state of conservation are automatically excluded from the evaluation processes. So there's a whole bunch of things that have been done to limit the problem of conflict of interest. Also employees are not allowed to do evaluations. Employees of ECOMOS or UNESCO. As we have seen, authorized heritage discourse in the World Heritage Context gives a great importance to the experts and their point of view. Since the discourse not only reflects the objects of their analysis but also gives them the license to create these objects, speak about them and to propose to take decisions which may affect more than just the sites or objects themselves with the help. This is a result of a long history concerning the different conventions and international laws. To make this long story short and to come to the point, most of the current UNESCO and ECOMOS instruments for heritage management offer deference to expert rule making them indispensable. Experts decide which properties should be protected by the Hague Convention. The nomination of World Heritage Properties does not go without expert approval. But how can this power of the expert be reconciled with community involvement, which initially has had a prominent role to play in the decision concerning protective measures for nominations and which lost its progressively to the benefit of the experts. Another point I want to mention in this context is the lack of questioning for the strategies that have been put into place before critical changes happened such as the fall of the Iron Curtain or the end of the colonialism of the spring revolution. These are usually linked to the notions of space which generally do not correspond to the original local community as known before. Anyway, the needs of the local communities are rarely taken in account. This makes it understandable that the local populations have many difficulties with appropriating themselves with the properties which are generally defined by national institutions with political agendas. In fact, both UNESCO and its advisory bodies are trying desperately to give back the power to involvement to local communities through different measures and amongst these the role of the expert as a translator. I'm sorry but I have to say this. To express the aspirations of the cultural owners, mostly institutions but also local communities, the expert advisor warrants a monopoly over what one may call the background of the nominations including understanding and interpreting legal elements, the situation of the owners and other stakeholders, the interpretation of the criteria, authenticity and integrity leading to the outstanding universal value. Also, he or she must consider more and more the market economy and help find acceptable solutions leading to advantages for the local population. Last of all, I would like to mention the problems of the flagrant Eurocentricity of the World Heritage. World Heritage as defined by the World Heritage Convention follows in general Eurocentric and North American philosophies determining the relationship between the past and the present as well as the position of the past in the present. This includes a growing preoccupation of vulnerability, uncertainty and risk. A great number of experts are from European and North American countries or have been to European and North American universities leading to opinions that tend to demand from the state parties northern hemisphere points of view, particularly for the management of sites. On the other hand, many of the governments of the state parties seem to seek management systems for their sites that correspond to what is done in the northern hemisphere believing them to be the panacea of their problems, more so that these correspond to the guidelines emitted by the UNESCO and ECOMOS. This may be a dilemma for the expert who plays an important part in the definition of these management plans. To conclude, as an expert in the context of World Heritage, it is therefore extremely important to understand not only the functioning of UNESCO, its advisory bodies and the corresponding governments of state parties, their needs and objectives, but also those of the people living in the heritage site and that will allow finding a way to resolve the differences, not to speak about difficulties between the stakeholders or partners involved, opening solutions which should be particular for each site and each situation, and above all the experts has to keep his or her integrity, values and respect of the ethics of the job. This is the main role of the experts. Thank you.