Website addresses below were accessible 10 June 2004.
2.
This article was first published in Art Monthly Australia Issue 162 (August 2003). It is an account of the Resolution of Cultural Property Disputes Seminar, the 7th International Law Seminar held by the Permanent Court of Arbitration at the Peace Palace, The Hague, The Netherlands, on 23 May 2003. In addition to the speakers referred to in this article, Seminar speakers also included Constance Lowenthal, former Director of the Commission for Art Recovery based in the US; Wojciech Kowalski of the University of Silesia and Legal Advisor to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Poland; and Konstantin Akinsha, Deputy Research Director of Art and Cultural Property for the Presidential Commission on Holocaust Era Assets in the USA. The Seminar papers will be published in the Permanent Court of Arbitration Peace Palace Papers VII in late 2004.
3.
Report of the Spoliation Advisory Panel in Respect of Painting Now in the Possession of the Tate Gallery (2001) <www.culture.gov.uk/cultural_property/spoilation_ad-panel.htm>. The painting is A view of Hampton Court Palace, by Jan Griffer the Elder (c1645–1718).
4.
PalmerNorman, Museums and the Holocaust (2000) 15.
5.
Report of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, above n 2, 13, [60, 65]; 15, [68].
The Convention covers monuments, archaeological sites, works of art, and scientific collections as well as museums and libraries. In peacetime, parties are to prepare for the safekeeping of such cultural property ‘against the foreseeable effects of an armed conflict’ and during conflict, are to prevent its theft, and not use it or its immediate surroundings ‘for purposes … likely to expose it to destruction or damage’ unless ‘military necessity imperatively requires’.
8.
Duc de Frias c/Baron Pichon, Tribunal Civil de la Seine, 17 April 1885, Clunet 1886, 599.
9.
The Franz Hals case, Demartini c. Williams, Tribunal de Grande Instance de Naterre, 6 July 2001, not published.
10.
1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Cultural Property is aimed at preventing imports and exports of illegally acquired objects; and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects established common legal rules for the restitution and return of cultural property.
11.
According to the Art Loss Register website, such claims are checked against forthcoming auctions sales of over 300,000 lots per annum. Shareholders in ALR also include the other major auction houses of Christie's, Phillips and Bonhams as well as insurance corporations and dealer associations. See <www.artloss.com>.
Such research has resulted in the Gallery's intention to return a painting by Flemish artist Frans Synders taken from Mme Edgard Stern in Paris in 1941.
16.
See WilliamsK.M., ‘Degas Settlement lands in unchartered territory’ at <http://museum-security.org/reports/05098.html#8>. Part of the difficulty is, as examined by Palmer, reluctance on the part of museums to question the provenance of works donated or on loan, see above n 3, 23.
Inter-Allied Declaration against Acts of Dispossession Committed in Territories Under Enemy Occupation or Control (The London Declaration) signed London, January 5, 1943, by South Africa, the USA, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, the Czechoslovak Republic, UK, Greece, India, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, USSR, Yugoslavia and the French National Committee.
20.
MelikianSouren, ‘In war or peace, the ruin of world heritage’International Herald Tribune, 3–4 May 2003, 7.
