New Macau says heritage protection consultation lacks in detail

Paul Chan (left) and Sulu Sou (center)

The New Macau Association (ANM) presented its opinion about the on-going public consultation of the Safeguard and Management Plan of the Historic Center of Macau yesterday during a press conference. The plan “lacks clarity and detail,” said Sulu Sou, the association’s elected lawmaker, in response to the Times.

According to Sou, “the main point [when drafting such plan] is that the government has the responsibility to protect the relationship with the citizens and with the historical environment, but we cannot find very clear or detailed information on the consultation document.”

“So we urge the government to make this plan more clear and to say [how] strict they intend to be regarding restrictions as well as the visual corridors and angles,” Sou said. These are all topics that the lawmaker cliamed were very important for the government to “[promote] improvements [on the plan] after this consultation.”

Sou said that even former Chief Executive Edmund Ho “issued a dispatch (83/2008) with [guidelines] that [were considered] quite strict in terms of control of the height of the buildings in the surroundings of Guia Lighthouse, but that is not enough to protect the lighthouse and the surroundings and there were many conflicts in these [last] 10 years.” He urged the government to do more.

Another of the issues encountered by ANM regarding the consultation plan was that the protection of the Penha Hill area was ignored. Sou warned, “If the government does not set a visual corridor from Penha Hill to Nam Van Lake and to the new reclamation [land] zone B it will damage the view from Penha Hill.”

The lawmaker also noted that the association has been following cases regarding heritage protection for the past two years and has issued several reports as a non-governmental organization (NGO) to UNESCO, with the last one being delivered last week. Sou informed he has yet to receive feedback from the organization but expressed hope that he will.
“Based on our [previous] experience we know that UNESCO pays great attention to NGO reports and it will follow up on our remarks as it did the last time in 2015,” Sou said.

Questioned as to whether ANM will share the content of such a report with the government, Sou said they are still considering whether to provide advanced access to the content, noting that it is the duty of UNESCO to hear all submissions on the case. Nevertheless, he claims, “the report is no secret anyway; we believe the government already has an idea about what is there.”