An International Problem

Another of the problems involved in activating our legal system lies with the "donor nations". Most have legal systems which are very different from ours, systems in which procedures, rules of evidence, etc. are not compatible with what we require, which is, essentially, a provision that ownership of all ancient objects is vested in the state and that private collections are registered with a deadline after which private collections are considered state/stolen property. Many of the donor countries are also poor and little money is available to pursue the expensive and time consuming business of attempting to get pieces back. This, added to disorganization, factionalism, and the knowledge that the looted pieces have lost their scientific value and are now only worth while as symbols of defense of the patrimony, impedes legal enforcement of the UNESCO accord and related treaties and agreements. The WWW does offer the donor nations one advantage: they can log on and see who is selling what bit of their looted heritage this week.

Better news is the large number of stolen art alert sites and sites dealing with the legalities and the ethics of the antiquities trade (cf. Yahoo.com’s archaeology site). The Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge(UK) publishes on-line its newsletter "Culture Without Context" , and advertises its conferences and other activities. Universities around the world publish programs and papers of conferences such as the one on "Art, Antiquity and the Law: Preserving Our Global Cultural Heritage" held 2 years ago at Rutgers. The USIA has an immense site which covers news of recent pillaging, new import restrictions, recent and expired import, the texts of US. and international laws (including the UNESCO accord and UNIDROIT) and a large informational site about prosecution and recovery of cultural property around the world as reported on the WWW.

Of extraordinary value is that the USIA site has image databases of classes of materials which are prohibited. Most dealers link their site to sites of related interest, usually archaeological ones. What those image databases mean and what the stolen art indices mean and what the reports on pillaging mean is that it is going to be ever more increasingly difficult for a buyer to claim due diligence in seeking the legitimacy of his purchase or that s/he is an innocent third party. This remains to be tested in the courts, but is a growing possibility.

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