German Law Stirs Concern Illegal Artifacts Will Be Easier to Sell
Andrew Curry*

Last week, the German Senate ratified the 1970 UNESCO Convention on Cultural Property, but archaeologists around the world fear that the long-delayed approval will do more harm than good. Many worry that Germany's interpretation of the convention will make the country a haven for illegally excavated antiquities from Iraq and elsewhere.
The UNESCO convention has been a defining document in the global battle to protect artistic and especially archaeological heritage from theft, looting, and destruction. Yet governments can make their own decisions on how to implement it. Whereas the United States and many of the other 112 signatories to the convention restrict or prohibit trade in broad categories of artifacts, the German law passed last Friday requires countries to publish lists of specific items they consider valuable to their cultural heritage. Only those items will be protected under German law, which means trade in undocumented artifacts, such as those looted from archaeological sites, will be difficult to restrict. "This is a bad signal," says Michael Mueller-Karpe, an archaeologist at the Roman-German Central Museum in Mainz. "It tells the world that whatever isn't published isn't worth protecting."

The idea of restricting specifically listed objects may make sense for museum collections but not for looted artifacts, say archaeologists. By the time they reach the market, such artifacts--Egyptian sculpture, Akkadian cuneiform tablets from Iraq, and Cambodian stone carvings, for instance--are typically stripped of the painstaking archaeological documentation and context that makes them scientifically valuable.

Still, Germany's implementation of the convention is well within the treaty's original requirements. "According to UNESCO, stolen objects have to be from documented collections," says Neil Brodie, research director of Cambridge University's Illicit Antiquities Research Centre. "There's no legal obligation for countries to treat illegally excavated objects as stolen." Mueller-Karpe calls the convention the "Grave-robbing Law" because he feels it encourages such theft.

Many countries have gone further than Germany in restricting the trade in illegally excavated artifacts. In the United States, for instance, dealers trading in certain categories of items are required to have export licenses from the country of origin or prove that the object has been out of the country of origin since before the agreement went into effect. "The important part is the difference between designated categories and a list of specific objects," says Patty Gerstenblith, a professor at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago, Illinois. "A list simply doesn't work, because artifacts that are taken out of the ground are unknown."

Indeed, as more countries crack down on the trade of artifacts--the United Kingdom and Switzerland, long notorious as transit countries for illegal antiquities, ratified the UNESCO treaty in 2002 and 2003, respectively--German archaeologists fear that the country's loopholes could make it a destination where dealers turn stolen property into legal merchandise that can then be traded worldwide. Until now, objects with no proof of origin have been assumed stolen. But under the new law, if they're not listed, they can be presumed legal and potentially sold with Germany as their country of origin--making it easier to move them to the United States or elsewhere. "It's like an antiquities laundry," says Mueller-Karpe.

Eckhard Laufer, a police official and part of the German Task Force on Illegal Excavation, says the new law is a missed opportunity. "We'll have to wait and see, but I'm afraid it's totally inadequate," Laufer says. "The new law won't make any improvement, and the situation can't get much worse than it is right now."

German coin collectors and art and antiquities dealers counter that the new law is too strong. "Germany always does things 150%. The more strict the laws are, the more objects are going to go to a gray market," says Christoph von Mosch, a Munich art dealer with a degree in classical archaeology. Countries can now make claims on artifacts worth more than €1000 for up to a year after they are posted for sale, creating complications and paperwork that some dealers say puts them at a competitive disadvantage.

That it has taken Germany 36 years to ratify the original UNESCO convention doesn't bode well for prompt action on the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, a much more stringent agreement that characterizes illegal excavation as theft and requires the return of stolen objects and cultural property. So far, only a few dozen countries have signed. Along with Germany, Brodie says, "none of the major market or transit countries"--including the United States, the U.K., Switzerland, France, and Belgium--"have ratified it."