The Second meeting of the Coordinating Committee on the Serial World Heritage Nomination of the Silk Roads is organized by the UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the UNESCO Cluster Office in Tehran, in cooperation with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan and the Turkmen National Commission for UNESCO in Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, 3 - 6 May 2011, with financial support from the NESCO Japan Funds-in-Trust; the Norway Funds-In-Trust, and the Turkmenistan authorities. During the meeting, the new UNESCO/Japan Funds-in-Trust project "Support for documentation standards and procedures of the Silk Roads World Heritage Serial and translational Nomination in Central Asia" will be launched.

The meeting will bring together representatives and experts from Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Republic of Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Nepal, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, as well as international experts from the International Council for Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) and institutions such as the UNESCO Category II Centre: International Institute for Central Asian Studies, the University College of London (United Kingdom) and the Raymond Lemaire International Centre for Conservation of the University of Leuven (Belgium), testifies to the international commitment to preserving a unique component of Asia's cultural heritage.

Within the framework of the Global Strategy for a representative and balanced World Heritage List adopted by the World Heritage Committee, UNESCO has been assisting the Asian States Parties in reviewing their national Tentative Lists and in the identification of new types of properties for World Heritage nomination. In this regard, the identification of potential themes such as the Silk Roads for serial and/or transnational World Heritage nomination in Asia was initiated by China and the Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan) as a priority activity to follow-up the World Heritage Periodic Reporting exercise in the Asia and the Pacific region.

The present Meeting will review progress made by the participating countries in implementing the Action Plan as adopted in the First meeting of the Coordinating Committee on the Serial World Heritage Nomination of the Silk Roads, held in Xi'an, China. It also aims to review the thematic study carried out by ICOMOS, in order to enable a comparative analysis for the properties on the Tentative Lists submitted by the participating States Parties, and to decide on the strategy for nomination. The Meeting will also invite representatives/experts from Belgium and Japan to discuss further international cooperation on the serial World Heritage nomination of the Silk Roads.