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Do you know about UNDROIT?

 

UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (UNIDROIT 1995)

 

  • The UNIDROIT Convention aims to harmonize the laws of participating countries regarding claims for the return of stolen or illegally exported cultural property.   More specifically, it allows private individuals to bring claims for the return of stolen cultural property that has ended up in a foreign country; and it aims to clarify the extent to which importing countries are obliged to respect other countries' export-control laws. The UNDIROIT Convention should thus be regarded as complementary to the UNESCO Convention on cultural property.  

 

 Sounds nice?

Read carefully!

 

What is the Unidroit Convention?

 

The Unidroit Convention (1995) is an international agreement for the return of stolen or illegally exported "cultural objects." It includes among the items defined as "cultural objects:"

 

  • (e) antiquities more than one hundred years old, such as inscriptions, coins and engraved seals
  • (i) postage, revenue and similar stamps, singly or in collections

 

An important provision of this convention defines any object that has been excavated or otherwise discovered and not reported to authorities, contrary to the law of the State in which it is discovered, as "stolen."

 

  • This goes beyond existing laws in most countries

 

Why are antiquities dealers and collectors concerned about the Unidroit Convention?

 

  • The definitions of stamps, coins and antiquities are so broad that any collector or institution owning a stamp, coin or minor antiquity (such as a scarab or oil lamp) more than one 100 years old, originating in  another country than that in which the collection resides, could be required to return it to the country of origin in the absence of documentary proof that the object was legally exported.
  • Moreover, if the collector cannot produce evidence of provenance, the object could be seized without compensation.

 

 

Have  a look here:

Saving antiquities for everyone

UNIDROIT Analysed

 

 

 

                                                                                               

 

Join this discussion forum UNIDROIT-L

 

 

 

Do you know about UNESCO Convention?

 

 

A letter  from George Ortiz

A response to a paper written on 4th February 2004 for distribution at the British Council Conference entitled

"Not for Sale" Looted artefacts: making the new laws work". organised in collaboration with Art-Law Centre.

Geneva, 5-6 February 2004

 

  • The British Council's title for a recent conference was "Not for Sale - Looted artefacts: making the new laws work."George Ortiz's response was: NOT FOR SALE - ONLY FOR DESTRUCTION !
  • A small handful of radical archaeologists, fundamentalist scholars and others have been attempting to manipulate world public opinion and bring about legislation to remove all freedom regarding the circulation of works of art.See for instance:
    ANTIQUITIES Trade or Betrayed Legal Ethical and Conservations Issues. Edited by Katryn W. Tubb
    An Archetype publication with UKIC Archaeology Section. 1995.
  • In the introduction by Lord Renfrew, prominently displayed on page xxi, is an attack on a private collector:
    "The collection of Mr. George Ortiz was recently shown in the Royal Academy. It is our job collectively to deprecate this, and to ensure that Mr. Ortiz goes away a little more ashamed than when he came since he is doing the past great damage by financing the large scale looting which is the ultimate source of so much of what he is able to exhibit."When George Ortiz reacted, he wrote him a letter expressing a retraction of the direct accusation.
  • This was followed in 2000 by The Ministerial Advisory Panel on Illicit Trade prepared for the UK Minister of Arts (May 2000). The eight-member Panel, chaired by Professor Norman Palmer, included not one single collector - the species historically responsible for saving the past.
  • More recently the conference organised at the University of Geneva by the British Council in conjunction with the Art Law Centre and Dr. Andrea Raschèr, Swiss Federal Office for Culture, entitled: 'Not for Sale’ Looted artefacts: making the new laws work.
  • Learning of the event at the last moment, George Ortiz dashed off the following text which was distributed the next morning at the conference on February 5, 2004:

 

Making the new laws The Unesco Convention looses sight that the essential for the past is its preservation. There is an obligation to preserve, protect, restore, exhibit, publish and share.

 

The greatest destroyer of the past throughout History is Iconoclasm. Iconoclastic destruction is always politically and religiously correct in the country and at the time it takes place. Examples: Afghanistan – Tibet - etc…

 

The Unesco Convention can do nothing about this.

The Convention categorises art as National Patrimony. This is reactionary, erroneous and destructively divisive. It gives priority to retention over considerations of conservation, truth and access.

 

It overlooks chance finds, the consequence of the colossal economic development of the world over the past 50 years during which the world’s wealth has multiplied by 15.

General human activities : agricultural such as ploughing, planting and irrigation (from ditches to concrete and plastic over millions and millions of miles) , industrial developments, highways, airports, buildings of all nature: public and private, etc…

 

Chance finds ought clearly to be differentiated from illicit digging: the deliberate act of searching for commerce or pleasure the remains of the past that are underground.

The Convention refuses to acknowledge chance finds, 80% of what is found, only saved in the measure they were by the existence of an outlet, the market.

 

With no outlet almost all, if gold or silver, will be melted, and the rest destroyed, unless some items survive by black market trade with all and any information lost.

 

Since almost all source countries claim everything as National Patrimony, there is no allowable export or trade. Consequently there can be no purchase in good faith of an archaeological item.

UNESCO is highly irresponsible: no vision, no action.(Already in Afghanistan, three years before the destruction of the Museum, Cultural authorities in Kabul made a request, through the French Embassy in Pakistan, for the removal of the Museum’s collections to a third country for safe keeping. UNESCO refused to even consider the request. And when they were about to do something, the Museum had just been destroyed.)

 

In Iraq, they called back their cultural representatives just before the US invaded. The looting in Iraq was the consequence of the lid blowing off the kettle after 25 years of a torturing tyrant’s carryings on and the unbelievable intensity of the US bombing in Baghdad. Many of the inhabitants went berserk.

The Museum and the archaeological sites were associated with Saddam. The Museum had a great portrait of Saddam in the hallway of its entrance. The dictator considered the Museum and the archaeological sites of Iraq a pride for his regime.

Obviously humans being as they are, stimulated by financial need and hunger, a few tried to sell artefacts and works of art from the Museum and various sites.LORD RENFREWLord Renfrew maintains that only data matters, an item without context is valueless.

 

Yet, 11 years ago he publishes a major Cycladic collection that forms a wonderful museum in Athens, all coming from illicit digging by farmers and fishermen, who by their very findings have destroyed all the data and contexts.Today, Lord Renfrew apparently says he is ashamed and wouldn’t do it again.

Tomorrow, I hope for Lord Renfrew that he won’t regret that he will be vastly responsible for the destruction of the past for future humanity.

 

With assertions such as: that, the antiquities trade (archaeological material) 150 million dollars per year comes just after the drug trade, 500 hundred billion dollars per year,

that, archaeological material is used to launder drug money,

that, to consider that the remains of the past that are art is subjective, emotional, irrational and valueless.

 

Lord Renfrew's assertions are simply nonsense! Art is essential to man, leading to understanding and acceptance of the other, an answer to his fundamental need in confronting the cosmos

There is a dimension to art that is like poetry, music, falling in love, fundamental to man and his survival.

 

May I finish by saying that the globalisation of art is ethical and moral, for dissemination saves because it enables works of art to survive the precariousness inherent to our planet such as natural cataclysms, wars and revolutions.

 

Of course it is evident that one must fight against and prevent the depredation of world heritage sites.

 

Of course it is evident that one must fight against illicit and clandestine digging, against the theft of works of art in the classical sense of the term.

 

However, the un-authorised export of any work of art that doesn’t come under the above three, can in NO WAY be considered a crime or the equivalent to theft.

 

I am opposed to the Unesco Convention because it is flawed and unfortunately ideological and simplistic, in contradiction with history and reality.

 

I am for the free movement of works of art and their protection,

 

I am for Human rights, the dissemination and preservation of art.

George Ortiz

Collector & humanist

 

Go to discussion forum on these issues

 

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IMPORTANT

  Imortant message and request for support 

from the Chairman, International Affairs Ancient Coin Collectors Guild

 

  • There is a VERY REAL threat that renewal of the Italian MOU may add ancient coins to the list of prohibited items. If that happens, it could become difficult or impossible to import many types of ancient coins into theUnited States. The impact on the worldwide market for ancient coins would be very serious.
  • One of the most exasperating problems the ACCG faces is that many collectors will never take threats such as this seriously until the disaster actualy happens.
  • It is relatively easy to prevent import restrictions now. Think for a moment of the outrage you would feel should anticollecting radicals succeed in stopping international commerce in ancient coins. Ancient coins would become much more difficult and expensive to obtain. Collections, paradoxically, would also become more difficult to sell. Your favorite dealers would be forced out of business because they could not get coins to offer. You would become angry enough THEN to make your voice heard, but the precedent would have been set. It would be very difficult and expensive to undo that damage. A lawsuit costing as much as a million dollars in legal fees might be the only way to save collecting.
  • Please take 5% of the effort you would have to spend rescuing collecting AFTER THE FACT to send your fax NOW. It won't take more than five minutes, it won't cost anything,  it WILL be read by the decision makers, and it WILL have an impact on the decision.
  • Anticollecting preservationists are fewer in numbers than we are, but these motivated zealots are doing a very good job of making THEIR voices heard. Don't let them win by default because you don't think this is really going to happen.
  • I hope it won't happen. I am doing everything I can to prevent it, so are other ACCG members. We are effective, we are highly motivated, we are working really hard, but there just aren't enough of us yet. We need YOUR help to succeed.

 

Dave Welsh

Chairman, International Affairs

Ancient Coin Collectors Guild

http://accg.us/

..............................................................................................................

 

The CPAC window for comment closes on August 24th 2005, so PLEASE make your  comments now.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/09/politics/09antiquities.html?pagewanted=pri

 

 

To  find out what's happening about this!

Join this discussion forum UNIDROIT-L

 

 

 

 

The position in the UK

 

 

In December 2003, the British Parliament passed legislation making it a criminal offense to dishonestly import or deal in any cultural object that has been illegally excavated or illegally removed from a monument, a building of historical, architectural or archaeological interest, or an underwater wreck.    The offense applies irrespective of whether the illegal removal took place inside or outside the United Kingdom, and irrespective of which country's law was violated by the removal. This last provision has important consequences, particularly for shipwrecks found in international waters, where several different countries may potentially have jurisdiction.

 

But The Portable Antiquities Scheme is more thoughtful

In fact they have a rather interesting website.

 

 

Trafficking in art objects next only to narcotics trade ?

 

http://tinyurl.com/ahz5k

 

"Terming trafficking in cultural property a "seamless trade" and pegging its

value at US $6 billion annually, a high-profile United Nations Educational,

Social and Cultural Organisation meet here today revealed that it was next

only to narcotics trade worth $7 billion."Trafficking in cultural property

has assumed the dimensions of a seamless trade as drug cartels peddle art

objects for ploughing the huge monetary gains in their narcotics trade and

also for arms dealings," Dr A Galla, vice-president of World Council of

Museums, told the UNESCO's workshop for the Asia-Pacific region on 'illicit

trafficking of cultural property'.

..."

 

Where did these statistics originate? What evidence supports this allegation

that drug cartels are selling art objects?

 

First, we had sensational reports of looting of the great Afghan Tilya Tepe

treasure and countless other objects from the Kabul museum:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/message/1441

 

Then, reports of priceless treasures looted from the Baghdad museum:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/message/1546

 

Then, a report that a huge treasure had been smuggled out of Afghanistan,

including an ancient coin worth $20 million:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/message/1283

 

Then, a report that terrorists were selling antiquities to finance their

activities (from the same source as Baghdad museum looting reports):

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/message/1443 (investigated by ACCG,

no supporting evidence).

 

Then, an AIA official alleged in the Congressional Record that terrorists

are selling antiquities to finance their activities:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/message/1572

 

In each case, investigation of these sensational reports and allegations has

revealed them to be either unfounded, or so exaggerated that publication was

extremely improper.

 

Allegations of looting, involvement of organized crime and terrorists in

antiquities trafficking, or dimensions of the illicit antiquities trade

should NEVER be accepted without checking source evidence. The record shows

that such allegations have proven to be very unreliable. Reporters

publishing such allegations, without verification or notice that they have

not been verified, are guilty of irresponsible journalism.

 

Finally, preservationists basing their anticollecting views on moral

principles ought to have enough respect for truth, fairness, and

responsibility to refrain from making allegations without first verifying

that their statements are true.

 

Dave Welsh

dwelsh46@...

Unidroit-L Listowner

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Unidroit-L/