Our world cultural heritage is extremely important and its destruction would constitute a crime against humanity.  Cultural property is important for many reasons. In this argument, its significance as part of our world cultural heritage will be assessed, while in the second argument, its local significance is examined.  Sites of cultural heritage often carry a large degree of aesthetic value. Renowned World Heritage sites like the Coliseum in Rome or the Pyramids of Giza or the Forbidden City in Beijing are truly stunning and constitute a masterpiece of architecture and a celebration of what the human mind and human culture are capable of. Their stunning beauty alone is sufficient to warrant their protection. However cultural property is more than just aesthetically valuable – they tell a story of human existence. Everything that makes up our society (our moral and aesthetic values, our language, our traditions, our way of life etc.) derives from our ancestors. Cultural property – be it in the form of archaeological sites, monuments or texts and art, provide our only means of connecting with our past. This is invaluable because of the enormous potential for understanding different cultures around the world and how they interact and often conjoin with each other. It offers opportunities for us to learn from the past and forge a better future. Recent atrocities such as the looting of museums in Bagdad and the damage caused to parts of ancient Babylon during the recent Iraq War are hugely harmful to the international community. The loss of part of our world heritage is even greater when one realises that the harms do not only affect our present day society, but all of future humanity.  The far-reaching and global nature of this harm is sufficient for it to be considered a crime against humanity. Indeed, ‘international practice in this ﬁeld indicates deliberate extensive destruction of cultural heritage may be included among international crimes’. [1] The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), for example, ‘places the destruction of buildings dedicated to religion, or of historical and artistic monuments among war crimes (that are part of the broader concept of crimina juris gentium , or crimes against the peace and the security of mankind’. [2] It is therefore evident that despite the lack of a global mechanism (such as the ICC) that currently condemns the destruction of cultural property as crimes against humanity, international precedent with the ICTY suggests it would be perfectly reasonable to do so.  [1] Francioni, Francesco and Lanzerini, Federico: “The Destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan and International Law”, EJIL (2003), Vol. 14 No. 4, 619–651, Oxford Journals,   [2] ibid