On May 10-12, State Secretary of the Ministry of Culture, Andrei Chistol attended the annual meeting of the Council of Europe's Steering Committee for Culture, Heritage and Landscape, being at sixth edition. The event took place in Strasbourg, Republic of France.

Participants from those fifty signatory states of the European Cultural Convention discussed the main activities of the CDCPP (culture, heritage, landscape) and their contribution in achieving the Council of Europe's objectives in the field of democracy.

At the event also attended Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Gabriella Battaini-Dragoni, who spoke about the importance of cultural rights, making reference to the recent publication "Culture and Human Rights: the Wroclaw Commentaries", a concise dictionary of cultural rights.

The meeting was an opportune occasion for exchanging views on the implementation of the Committee's action Plan, as well as setting priorities and expected results in the context of the adoption by the Council of Ministers of the Council of Europe of the European Strategy in the cultural heritage field for the 21st Century and the European Convention on crimes concerning cultural goods. In this sense, a particular attention it was concentrated on the implementation way of the Committee initiatives on the European Cultural Heritage Days, establishing for 2017 the generic "Heritage and Nature"; the action Plan of the Framework Convention of the Europe Council concerning the value of the cultural heritage for society, the European Network for Council of Europe Cultural Heritage and the Council of Europe Enlarged Partial Agreement (EPA) on the cultural itineraries.

A special attention was accorded to the European Union's initiative to declare 2018 - the European Year of Cultural Heritage, an initiative that aims to promote the European heritage and values. In this context, Andrei Chistol spoke about starting with 2017 of the Twinning project, in the Republic of Moldova "Support for the Cultural Heritage Promotion in the Republic of Moldova, by its Preserving and Protecting", as well as the necessity to include the non-EU states in the activities that will be carried out by the European Commission.

At the meeting, Secretary of State spoke about the implementation of the Framework Indicators for culture and democracy domain, stressing the need to provide technical assistance to modernize the statistical data collection and dissemination system; implementation of the cultural policies Compendium of and improvement of the culture management, requesting assistance to the Council of Europe in making a cartography of the creative industries and cultural participation in the Republic of Moldova; adoption of the European Convention by the Republic of Moldova on crimes concerning the cultural goods, mentioning the necessity for technical assistance for the development of institutional and human capacities to prevent the illicit traffic of cultural goods.