World heritage - Halong bay Vietnam

World heritage - Halong bay Vietnam. The regulation of access to heritage, culture and monuments is inevitably linked to travel and tourism. Travel and tourism Halong bay Vietnam has become one of the dominant dimensions of preservation and heritage, culture and monuments. In this context there is national regulation in most countries as well as significant world-level regulation.

World heritage law (another useful description that would be contestable by others) as manifested principally in the World Heritage Convention, seems to avoid the focus on the rights of host communities. Indeed, the inherent philosophy is to universalise the heritage. Paradoxically this may effectively transform the outsider, the possibly-perceived vulnera- ble visitor, into a privileged person at the expense of the resident, albeit as an unintended consequence. Such an approach may seem calculated to exclude the local elements that may have expected the greatest benefit from the exploitation of World Heritage Sites. Some argue that local communities have been uprooted, impoverished and treated as eye- sores sometimes in the development of heritage sites. Evolution of restitution principles may re-balance the historical imbalance. Nevertheless, there are many examples of the cul- tural heritage of the community that owned or created it being enjoyed or exploited by the community that may have been involved in expropriation. The superior claim to retain pos- session by the expropriating community is merely salt in old wounds. Thus there is evi- dence of world heritage law favouring the visitor and not the visited. At the same time, there are many examples of national local heritage initiatives. More importantly, UNESCO

is very involved in the evolution of policy on cultural tourism. Nevertheless, such policy

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has to feed into the evolution of legal frameworks, otherwise the dominant paradigms may

render local community considerations effectively irrelevant.

Soft law/codes of ethics. Codes of Ethics are sometimes classifiable as ‘soft law’. This generally refers to rules that are not actually legally binding, but that may perhaps prefig- ure how hard law develops. The rationale of codes and softer law in comparison with other harder legislative or judicial approaches has some benefits. The World Tourism Organization’s Global Code of Ethics has had mixed reviews. While much of it is vague and lacking in specification from a lawyer’s perspective, it does have one major benefit. At least it seeks to envisage a sui generis, integrated idea of the traveller/tourist construct. While judges will no doubt find it vague in the event of such principles ever being used in

a legalistic way, it is remarkable that there are no great codes elsewhere available to turn

to. Unlike the World Tourism Organization, some Codes and Declarations are of dubious nature. The WTO Code of Ethics provides as follows: