More on the French President's Cultural Preservation Fund

As François Hollande addressed a crowd gathered at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) two weeks ago, CHL tweeted about the French president's intention to create a fund to protect cultural heritage. What do we know about this proposed fund?

“We want to create a fund, a global fund to support the safeguarding of cultural heritage with the ambition to raise $100 million,” explained Hollande. “This fund will finance the rescue of works and monuments to ensure the restoration and reconstruction of places of our collective memory and train specialists, archaeologists, curators, historians, so that we may always keep a trace of heritage.”

Vice President Joe Biden (r) introduces
President François Hollande (l) at The Met.

Hollande first announced the creation of a fund in November 2015 when he addressed the general conference of UNESCO. He told the international body, “But we also need to involve private partners to ensure that public resources are not the only ones that can be requested. I propose that there may be a single international structure, clearly identified that can gather donations and funding, and establish an international endowment fund dedicated to endangered cultural property.”

In his recent visit to The Met, President Hollande reflected that the idea for the fund actually originated in Japan this past May when he was with President Barack Obama at the G7 summit. Hollande’s remarks followed an introduction made by Vice President Joe Biden. 

[Sidebar:  When the G7 met, it published an Action Plan on Countering Terrorism and ViolentExtremism, calling on nations “to enhance efforts to hinder looting and trafficking of cultural property originating from regions under the control of terrorist groups.”]

Biden's surprise appearance at The Met generally touted White House efforts to preserve cultural heritage. He described ISIS's sale of artifacts to fund terrorism while simultaneously attacking cultural diversity in the Middle East, which the vice president called an affront to the people of the region. Biden asserted that trafficking laws targeting antiquities are rigorously enforced.

Hollande’s proposed cultural preservation fund is expected to be ajoint project between France and the United Arab Emirates, which is why H.H. Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan, UAE Minister of Foreign Affairs, was on hand for Hollande’s pronouncement. The pair are expected to lead a conference on cultural heritage protection at the Louvre Abu Dhabi in December.

Text and original photos copyrighted by Cultural Heritage Lawyer, a blog commenting on matters of cultural property law, art law, cultural heritage policy, antiquities trafficking, and museum risk management. Blog url: culturalheritagelawyer.blogspot.com. Any unauthorized reproduction or retransmission of any blog post without the express written consent of CHL is prohibited. CHL is a service of Red Arch Cultural Heritage Law & Policy Research, Inc.

For Richer or Poorer: Commentary on The Economics of Cultural Property Laws

“The Economics of Cultural Property Laws” presents a controversial study that attempts to wed archaeology--a knowledge-gathering discipline focused on exacting evidence collection, thoughtful research, and a deep concern for heritage preservation--to a production-based enterprise evaluated only by the many spectacular objects it can generate.

The article, which offers more sophistry than careful study, appears in The Indonesian Journal of International & Comparative Law, Volume 1, Issue 1 (January 2014). It has gained notoriety after being published in a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece this week, albeit in an abbreviated fashion and with a muted accentuation on economics. The op-ed is titled "The Archaeology Paradox: More Laws, Less Treasure."

The study's author laments in the LA Times that the world today is "culturally poorer" because major archaeological discoveries are made less often, singularly blaming "rigid cultural property laws" as the apparent reason why there are fewer spectacular excavations.

A careful reading of the underlying Indonesian Journal article suggests an undertone that archaeology is akin to a mining operation whose primary mission is to produce fantastic raw materials for consumption. Indeed, the author openly advocates for what he calls "the [archaeological] source nation's comparative advantage in raw antiquities."

To prove the hypothesis that "[c]ultural property laws ... reduce the source country’s archaeology market and drive up excavation costs," the author employs commercial terms that are ill-suited to the discipline of archaeology. For example, the author writes that "[archaeological] [s]ource nations can maximize their comparative advantage by selling future interests in buried artifacts to archaeologists with the resources to excavate them."

Statements like these cause one to wonder whether the harvesting of consumer-driven heritage is under discussion rather than authentic archaeology. Indeed, the author ultimately--and wrongly--measures the richness of cultural heritage by simply counting the number of sites par excellence that the archaeologist's trowel has excavated, those found on UNESCO's World Heritage List. The other thousands of sites spanning the globe are overlooked, their information about the past evidently discarded as insignificant to the richness of humanity's heritage.

The study should acknowledge that archaeology is not really archaeology when the discipline is transformed into a shovel-ready enterprise that simply waits to employ diggers and equipment for the purpose of generating the choicest inventories. Archaeology's purpose, by contrast, is to "preserve, protect, and interpret the precious record of the human past by employing the highest ethical, professional, and intellectual standards," a goal aptly stated by the Archaeological Institute of America's vision statement.

Do cultural patrimony laws instigate cultural poverty as the study's author suggests? The truth is that cultural poverty begins when non-renewable heritage resources are ripped from the earth without proper scientific documentation and study. We are culturally poorer when knowledge of the past is irretrievably lost because looters and vandals have knowingly or recklessly tampered with the hard evidence preserved beneath the ground. Cultural poverty persists when stolen artifacts are smuggled, fenced, and unlawfully purchased. That is why cultural patrimony laws, which help hold criminals accountable and which aid in separating wrongdoers from their illegal profits, enjoy a highly ranked place in heritage preservation.

Neither the law nor authentic archaeology can divorce themselves from serious cultural heritage protection measures.

Photo credit: Russell Hugo

By Rick St. Hilaire Text copyrighted 2010-2014 by Ricardo A. St. Hilaire, Attorney & Counselor at Law, PLLC. Blog url: culturalheritagelawyer.blogspot.com. Any unauthorized reproduction or retransmission of this post is prohibited. CONTACT INFORMATION: www.culturalheritagelawyer.com

Upcoming LCCHP Event in New York: The Monuments Men, Social Media, the Law and Cultural Heritage

LAWYERS COMMITTEE FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE PRESERVATION FIFTH ANNUAL CONFERENCE

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The Monuments Men, Social Media, the Law and Cultural Heritage

Historical, Political, Social and Cultural Perspectives

on the Protection of Cultural Heritage in Times of Armed Conflict

 

Friday, November 1, 2013

Fordham Law School, Lincoln Center Campus
113 W. 60th Street, New York, NY 10023

 

Click here to register online today.

This post is researched, written, and published on the blog Cultural Heritage Lawyer Rick St. Hilaire at culturalheritagelawyer.blogspot.com. Text copyrighted 2010-2013 by Ricardo A. St. Hilaire, Attorney & Counselor at Law, PLLC. Any unauthorized reproduction or retransmission of this post is prohibited. CONTACT INFORMATION: www.culturalheritagelawyer.com