Posted on: December 5, 2018 by Emily Gould
The adoption of the Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art by 44 nations in 1998 marked a deeply significant moment in the development of cultural policy in the 20th and 21st centuries. Whilst the extent of looting perpetrated by the Nazis during the 1933-45 period was fairly well understood at that stage, few would have […]
Posted on: November 29, 2018 by Sharon Hecker
The Benin Dialogue Group has recently announced plans to construct a new Royal Museum in Nigeria to display objects looted from the country that are now in European collections. This is an excellent example of what I call cultural ‘matrimony’, a new approach that can be used to resolve heritage disputes. This solution is in […]
Posted on: November 28, 2018 by Alexander Herman
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron received the report he commissioned in March on the restitution of African artefacts currently held in French Museums. The commission followed the President’s speech in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, delivered one year ago today, in which he had called for “the conditions to be met within five years for the […]
Posted on: November 12, 2018 by Alexander Herman
Tonight, Sotheby’s auction house in New York will hold a major sale of early 20th century European masterworks, including pieces by Kandinsky, Monet, Magritte and Miró. But perhaps most exceptional will be three restituted works that had been spoliated during the Nazi period. Two of these were returned to the heirs of Alfred Flechtheim, a […]
Posted on: July 1, 2018 by Emily Gould
The 2018 Transatlantic Cultural Property Crime Symposium held on 28th and 29th June 2018 promised a varied and wide-ranging approach to current issues in heritage crime. It certainly did not disappoint on that score. The conference, organised jointly by Queen Mary University of London, Mount Saint Mary College, New York and the University of Maryland […]
Posted on: April 5, 2018 by Kiri Cragin Folwell
Assistant Director Alexander Herman was quoted yesterday in the New York Times article U.K. Museum Offers Ethiopia Long-Term Loan of Looted Treasures. Alexander commented on treasures taken from Ethiopia 150 years ago that could be returned on a long-term loan from the Victoria and Albert Museum. He said, “The loan is a powerful method of […]
Posted on: February 9, 2018 by Alexander Herman
The story begins 150 years ago. In 1868, deep in the deserts of east Africa, a British expedition led by General Robert Napier, was attacking the capital of the Abyssinian Empire, Maqdala, ruled over by King Tewodros. The British were looking to teach Tewodros a lesson for having imprisoned a number of British envoys and […]
Posted on: December 12, 2017 by Holly Woodhouse
A golden crown dating from the fourth-century BC will be returned to Turkey following an out-of-court settlement between a Turkish national residing in Scotland and the Government of Turkey. The crown, reported to have been valued at £250,000, was in the possession of Edinburgh café owner Murat Aksakalli, who claimed to have inherited it from […]
Posted on: November 28, 2017 by Alexander Herman and Holly Woodhouse
Last month, on the 21st of October, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office (along with local police) seized an ancient Achaemenid Persian bas-relief from the European Fine Art Fair at the Park Avenue Armory in New York. The item was being offered for sale by the London-based art dealer Robert Wace for roughly $1.2 million. The […]
Posted on: October 30, 2017 by Amoury Groenen
On 27 October 2017, the International Institute for the Unification of Private Law – hereinafter Unidroit – officially launched the 1995 Unidroit Convention Academic Project (UCAP). The project – which was first announced during a special event on “Promoting and Strengthening the international legal framework for the protection of cultural heritage” held on 28 February […]