The text of the Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (the Convention) had its origin in a Unidroit Study Group which produced the Preliminary Draft Unidroit Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (hereinafter PDC or Urtext) in 1991. With the PDC as their working text, four conferences of National Experts produced the Draft Unidroit Convention on the International Return of Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, and a Diplomatic Conference held in June, 1995, produced the Convention.

Great efforts have been made by representatives of a multitude of countries to rectify the situation currently confronting parties, whether they be private individuals or states, that seek the return of stolen or illegally exported cultural objects. The organization UNIDROIT has been at the forefront of that effort. In June of 1995, representatives of over seventy states met in Rome and adopted the UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects. The UNIDROIT Convention will enter into force as it is ratified by individual states.

The UNIDROIT Convention provides a claimant of a Contracting State with the option of using arbitration to settle its dispute. Until now, there has been little discussion of the advantages that international arbitration can bring to this domain. This article focuses on the benefits of international arbitration in facilitating the resolution of cultural property disputes. It presents an in-depth analysis of the text of the UNIDROIT Convention in the context of existing regulations in this area. It then examines three different approaches to international arbitration. These models serve to highlight the particular characteristics of this dispute resolution mechanism that make it ideally suited to cultural property disputes.

When a thief steals a work of art and resells it to a bona fide purchaser, most commentators favor protecting the buyer's title against a claim by the original owner. American law on this issue has been in flux, and today most American States resolve these disputes by balancing the buyer's blameworthiness against the owner's delay and fault. Such ad hoc statutes of limitations are misguided because they encourage art theft, reward morally culpable buyers, and leave the law unclear and unpredictable. Instead, the law should award title automatically to theft victims who immediately report their losses to the police and an international computerized database of art thefts. Doing so would create clear incentives for owners to report thefts and for buyers and art merchants to check the database, thus drying up the market for stolen art.

Grave robbers, we all know, loot tombs for material gain. Recently, however, Italian tomb robbers, or tombaroli, have sought public attention by publishing their biographies and appearing on television to present an entirely new image of their métier. They depict themselves as heroes who bring the treasures of the past to the public and boast of an expertise, which remains unrecognised by official archaeologists. Rather than merely dismissing these stories as a justification, or glorification of an illegal activity, a more careful reading reveals many issues, which are of considerable importance to heritage management and archaeological research. These accounts contain a wealth of information on the identity of the people who loot tombs; their backgrounds, motivations and attempts to legitimate their actions. Moreover, they provide a unique insight into the relations between tomb robbers and the communities within which they operate. It is well known that public opinion in Italy and elsewhere to some extent sanctions illegal digging and, in my view, changing these attitudes could prove to be one of the most important steps towards a more effective policy of protecting the cultural patrimony.

The articles concerning a licit international trade in artistic and other cultural objects published recently in the first volume of the 1995 International Journal for Cultural Property address a great number of issues concerning current trends in the law governing the exportation, importation and transfer of ownership of cultural property. What is barely mentioned in these articles, however, is the problem of the trade in art objects originating from occupied territories in times of armed conflict.

Since the second half of the last century, public international law has been developing rules regulating the restitution of cultural objects removed from occupied territories during armed conflict. Today it is generally recognized that customary international law forbids pillage. The Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict further mandates that artifacts removed from an occupied territory must be returned to the competent authorities of that territory at the close of hostilities. The Arab-Israeli case highlights the problematic side of this solution. Following the Six Day War in 1967, the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, the Gaza strip and the territory known as the “West Bank” came under Israeli control. Israeli archaeologists carried out numerous excavations, and discovered artifacts of special importance to Jewish cultural heritage. It is regrettable that, as a result of the peace treaty with Egypt, these artifacts can no longer be exhibited and appreciated at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, but had to be delivered to Egypt, where they now face an uncertain future. A similar fate may befall the artifacts excavated in the Golan Heights. The Palestinian claim for restitution cannot be based on the Protocol. The Problem is nevertheless the same in all cases; if the artifacts are to be preserved, properly appreciated and made available for purposes of study and research, it may be more appropriate to distribute them among the states by way of compromise and agreement, that will seek to enhance their cultural significance, rather than use the arbitrary sole criterion of the place of discovery.

One of the major issues confronting U. S. courts in international cultural property cases is the significance of foreign export restriction violations. This is a particularly sensitive issue for museums in art purchasing nations since aggressive support of the view that export restriction violation is theft could result in the return of much of a museum's collection. In fact, Thomas Hoving, past director of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art stated, “almost every antiquity that has arrived in America in the past ten to twenty years has broken the laws of the country from which it came.”