Attacks on culture can be crimes against humanity

Robert Bevan
Member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites, which advises Unesco on world heritageOnly an aesthete with a warped sense of priorities would put crimes against culture on a par with crimes against people. That dusty canard has resurfaced with the trial in The Hague of Al Faqi Al Mahdi for the destruction in 2012 of a mosque and nine of Timbuktus World Heritage Site-listed mud-built shrines.
Al Mahdis trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) is the first devoted