Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-06-28
Topic: Culture
Rupert Bertram Mitford (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I rise to speak to this amendment and to say that I do not plan to move Amendment 29 because it raises this issue A number of us in this Chamber were responsible for pushing through the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act. Although it is good to know that at least one prosecution has taken place under the Act, that did not stop it, at the beginning of the last Government, being put forward by the Conservative Back-Benchers as a piece of legislation that was redundant and could be got rid of because it had never been used. The problem is that such legislation gets moved in response to a specific event; in this case, it was the looting of the museum in Baghdad. The ratification of this Bill has been moved forward very much due to the cultural destruction that is taking place in Syria at the moment I do not believe that this Bill is the place for this amendment, even though I have put my name to it. However, it is probable that we could raise it again in any money laundering legislation that comes in front of the House in the future. As the noble Lord, Lord Renfrew, so adroitly pointed out, the real problem is that a lot of art provenance is not known, is written on dodgy pieces of paper, or is attested to collections that no longer exist in foreign countries. This is a problem I take on board the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, that because there is a law, many people will not break it. However, there are many laws that people know are there and do break. The art market does not have the best of reputations from instances in the past. Therefore, if we are to clear up the art market, we need to make sure that there is some implication of having a law. That is why I put down the amendment to say that there should be a review each year. For example, we know that, in 2003, the amount of Mesopotamian artefacts on the marketplace drove down the price. We also know the source of those Mesopotamian artefacts, and, bizarrely, that trading was done very much in the areas that are next to the British Museum. Provenance is a double-edged sword. Many of the artefacts that are now safe in the British Museum were illicitly lifted and their provenance is now based on the paperwork that proves they were filtered from the country of origin without the authorities’ knowledge. One could say that many of the collections of the great museums have a slight provenance issue Although this amendment will probably not be agreed, it raises the issue that, although we have the law, it has not been taken as seriously as it should be because it has not had the funding that it might require. Resources are needed to deal with this. The noble Lord, Lord Inglewood, raised the issue of trying to bring forward prosecutions to the police. However, the arts and antiquities squads were so underfunded that they resorted to trying to get special constables who were recruited from staff at the British Museum. In my view, that is not a well-funded or well-thought-out prosecution system to deal with a market that runs into the millions of pounds.