Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60
- 70)
THURSDAY 23 MARCH 2000
MR MARK
TAYLOR, DR
MAURICE DAVIES
AND MR
MAX HEBDITCH
60. Do they abide by the same codes of conduct?
(Dr Davies) Yes.
(Mr Taylor) Yes.
Derek Wyatt
61. Listening to what you have said so far,
it seems to me the key thing in all this is the dealer. It is
the dealer who knows basically the network of what is going on
in a particular area and it is the dealer who more or less knows
whether they are dodgy or not since they have a pretty good intuition.
Once it is sold, if I am the buyer, I can just say I bought it
from a dealer. Is it not licensing the dealer and making sure
the dealer comes within some sort of trading standards of consumer
protection which is the weak link in this?
(Dr Davies) It is more worrying than that because
actually there is increasing evidence that the illicit trade in
antiquities and stolen art is used for money laundering and as
collateral in big drugs deals. It is a serious criminal enterprise
at the high value end. There is a real need to do something about
it. There are the arguments of archaeologists that we need everything
and we need to know the context, but some people do not agree.
However, archaeologists say that and they find fantastic things
out as a result. There is the moral argument about the people
who are having their cultural heritage ripped from under their
feet, who are losing potential tourist income, but more than that
they are losing evidence of their past; it is an affront to their
societies really. In a sense the thing which should perhaps concern
us most from the point of view of our own vested interests is
how it is facilitating organised crime. We mentioned one or two
examples in our evidence which are slightly anecdotal of planes
coming with looted antiquities and drugs on the same flight and
so on. There are all sorts of suggestions that it is being used
for money laundering, so some kind of regulation seems to be essential
for that if nothing else. Even if it is only a minority of things,
it is clearly happening.
62. That makes it harder to understand properly
why we have not signed the two international treaties on this.
Are we the bad boys? Are we the milieu of the market? Is the trade
through London the issue?
(Mr Taylor) We lead the world in this trade.
63. We do?
(Mr Taylor) Yes.
64. We have a grey market, as they say.
(Mr Taylor) Yes.
(Dr Davies) In terms of the UNESCO Convention the
United States partly ratified it in 1983, which gave the United
States customs the power to prevent the import of certain kinds
of material. For example, they have a bilateral agreement with
Cambodia so if something from Angkor Wat turns up to be imported
into the States, the American customs will stop it and they do.
The person trying to do it may or may not be convicted. I am not
sure of the details. They may not be charged but it is illegal
to take it into the States. If that same item from Cambodia turns
up at a British port, nobody could care less. It is perfectly
legal. Lord Inglewood, the spokesman for the previous Department
of National Heritage, told the House of Commons, in February 1997
that it is not an offence to import into this country items which
have been illegally excavated or exported from another country.
It is illegal in the case of the EU but elsewhere in the world
it is not. In that sense Britain is the kind of dirty man of the
world and we hear that even Switzerland is currently drafting
some kind of implementing legislation. UNIDROIT is a bit different.
It is a newer treaty and a lot of countries are nervous about
it. The reasons in favour of signing both those treaties seem
to be far greater than the small technical legal arguments against
them. We do not have the legal competence to answer it but I am
sure lawyers could find a way round it and Government draftsmen
could if they wanted to.
(Mr Taylor) I am sure somewhere along the way you
will have a Minister in front of you and the question for the
Department is: if, as they say, international law and British
law are incompatible and it is hard to pick your way through that,
how are they going to fulfil their pledge to put in place equivalent
standards and measures to make sure that we at least comply with
it morally if not legally? They tell us they will and they seem
very committed, but we wait to see what they are going to do.
65. Can you explain the issue over the Francis
Bacon stories which have appeared this week? Are they stolen?
Is that intellectual copyright? What is that issue which has been
in the newspapers?
(Dr Davies) I do not know anything about it.
(Mr Taylor) I know very little about it. I do not
think there is any suggestion it is stolen; it is more a case
of contracts and things. It is a slightly different issue but
I am afraid I am not up on it.
Mr Keen
66. Twice logbooks have been mentioned and that
it is not practical. The Internet can obviously make quite a contribution
towards record-keeping. What gaps are there? Presumably on the
Internet there must be one per cent of the total store of antiquities
or is it five per cent? What progress are we making both for education
and the practical things?
(Dr Davies) A key problem is that there are all sorts
of databases: the Art Loss Register, which is a growing database,
particularly of stolen art and Interpol, who do not actually use
the Internet for various reasons but they publish a CD-Rom. One
of the problems is that with illicit excavations nobody knows
the stuff exists, so you cannot perform due diligence. If you
have an unknown Roman antiquity which arrives, being offered to
you, you cannot really ever find out if it was illegally dug up
because by definition it is fairly fresh out of the ground, has
never been photographed, has never been documented. There is a
bit of a Catch 22 situation. We are beginning to recommend to
museums that if they cannot prove it is completely legitimate,
there is a strong enough risk it is illicit that they should not
acquire it. We are still thinking it through really but there
is so much evidence that you almost have to turn the normal thing
on its head and say that things are guilty, and should be assumed
guilty, until proven innocent. It is a really alarming state of
affairs. In the absence of proper documentation you cannot quite
ever prove things.
67. When famous art treasures are stolen, we
are told by the press that it is for some private collection,
somebody who wants to keep these treasures for themselves. How
much of that really goes on? Are there many private collections
to which nobody else has access or is that just newspaper talk?
(Dr Davies) I do not know much about it. At the Museums
& Galleries Commission seminar last week, Manuas Brinkman,
the Secretary General of the International Council of Museums,
gave some statistics that according to Interpol something like
only 12 per cent of stolen art is ever recovered. Apparently he
also suggested that Interpol perhaps only covers about 50 per
cent of the stolen art. Not everything is notified to it. So only
a tiny proportion is ever recovered.
(Mr Taylor) These publications we have from ICOM are
of 100 missing objects from ... This one is just from Angkor and
these objects are still missing. Therefore they cannot be in public
hands or we should know where they are. These are just the most
obvious 100; there are thousands more and they must be in private
hands somewhere. There is a market.
68. It is very strange. Would these individuals
who want to keep these things not like to show other people that
they had them? Not the ones which have been stolen, but you would
think they would want to show others their private collections,
through the Internet for instance. Forget about the illegal stuff,
should a contribution be made, either technical or financial and
technical, to help people's collections get onto the Internet?
You mentioned that the New Opportunities Fund has made a start
on this but there must be an awful long way to go. Would that
help?
(Mr Hebditch) You have to be careful in terms of getting
private collections publicly accessible through the net in that
way because you actually provide quite a lot of information about
where they are and not everyone can afford museum grade security
to protect their own collections. A lot of material, even in museum
exhibitions, would come from anonymous collectors, simply to protect
the security of that item. You have to be very careful in striking
a balance between what is in the public domain, where you can
certainly make a lot of information available, and those items
of the nation's cultural property which are still in private hands.
69. What would you like our report to say to
help in this? If you could draft two sentences each what would
you like us to say?
(Dr Davies) It needs to draw attention clearly to
the damage being done by the illicit trade and to point out that
it is the collectors and the dealers which cause the trade and
then to look at different ways of stopping collectors and dealers
wanting to stimulate looting. There are two sides. There are all
the different legal measures from legislation to international
conventions, but there is also in a sense that the Government
could show some leadership and try to create a bit of a moral
climate in which it is just not acceptable. The change in attitude
to fur coats or birds' eggs is extraordinary and these collectors
probably do show things to each other. There probably are networks
of people and they probably think there is nothing wrong with
it and in a sense that may partly be out of a slight naivety about
where this stuff has really come from but also because people
do not really care about the destruction of sites and people's
cultural heritage in other bits of the world. With the twin messages
of the law and morality, if you have a mixture of a moral climate
and some kind of legal regulation, you could probably get rid
of most of the trade. People say you will drive it underground.
You would, but I am sure it would be much smaller and it is such
a big trade. If you could chop 50 per cent or 75 per cent of it
off, or at least Britain's part in it, that would be a very good
thing.
Mrs Golding
70. You said we were waiting to see what legislative
alternatives the Government came up with. How long have we been
waiting for these?
(Mr Taylor) The actual announcement they were not
going to ratify the two happened only six weeks ago but that followed
about five years of thinking. The UNESCO one was 1970 and UNIDROIT
was 1995, so they have taken rather a long time to come to the
conclusion that they cannot do it. We did actually have a meeting
with the Secretary of State earlier this week and they really
seem very keen to do it and we are very anxious to find out what
exactly they are going to do to drive through the principles even
if they cannot drive through the legislation.
Chairman: Thank you very much; a very
useful and interesting session.
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