Word of welcome by Jan van Zanen at the meeting in honour of the Unesco conference, 13 May 2024

Dear all,

A very warm welcome to The Hague.

The city whose honour it is to host this special Unesco conference.

Seventy years ago, The Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict was signed in the Peace Palace.

At that time traces of the destruction left by the Second World War were still evident everywhere in The Hague.

Some ten days ago we commemorated the victims our city suffered in the period 1940 to 1945.

War affects not only people, cultural heritage, too.

“…any damage to cultural property, irrespective of the people it belongs to, is damage to the cultural heritage of all humanity, because every people contributes to the world’s culture…” states the pre-amble to The Hague Convention.

Precisely in that spirit, The Hague art dealer Willem Jan Hoogsteder launched a remarkable initiative:

This month thirty works from The Hague School, selected from his private collection, will be on show in Kyiv.

They are being exhibited in the Khanenko Museum which was largely emptied at the start of the war.

An artistic greeting from The Hague intended to encourage the residents of Kyiv and its visitors.

We sincerely hope that the beauty of the exhibited works will enable visitors to the Khanenko Museum to forget for a while the cares and sorrows caused by the war.

As Mayor, I am proud of this gesture of solidarity and moral support for art lovers in Ukraine.

Added to which, the art on display is directly linked to our city.

The painters of The Hague School were at work at a time when The Hague was just starting to develop into an international city of peace and justice.

With the First Peace Conference of 1899 being the first highpoint.

One of the results of that conference was the founding of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, for which the Peace Palace was built.

Since then the symbol of The Hague’s special position in the world of peace and justice.

This year we will be marking not only the 70^th anniversary of The Hague Convention, but also commemorating 125 years of peace and justice in The Hague.

In that spirit that I wish you a fruitful conference.