In another case, that exemplifies the wide range of items that can be subjected to looting, in this case, a Mercedes-Benz 500K Spezial car.

Apart from the fact that the case is interesting in that it isn’t about the usual paintings / sculptures, it raises various other questions from a legal viewpoint – which are picked up on in the article.

From:
Oostward Kunstrecht

Looted Art, Art Theft
Wartime claim on old-timer still valid?

On 29 May 2012, the Hamburg District Court rendered an important decision in a matter concerning a vehicle that was taken from Germany in 1945 by U.S. soldiers. The car, a Mercedes-Benz 500K Spezial, had been acquired by Hans Friedrich Prym in 1935. This unique and valuable car disappeared when Prym had been imprisoned by the allied forces. The Mercedes at some point in time after the Second World War resurfaced in the United States, in any event around 1976. The old-timer was put up for auction in 2011 in California, as the heirs had come to learn. The auctioneer allegedly refused to hand-over the vehicle. Mr. Frans van Haren, a Dutchman, acquired the old-timer at the auction.

The car after the auction was shipped to Germany to be displayed at the Techno Classica Car fair in Essen in March 2012, at which point the German authorities seized the car.
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Most cases of looted items refer to man made artefacts – or, in the cases where the artefact is the product of a natural phenomenon, it is one that was later discovered & in some sense revered. However, there are other categories of cases such as this one – where an item as been discovered & looted from a country – and which is equally much a case of looting anther country’s heritage for direct profit by the looters.

From:
Financial Times

June 19, 2012 2:06 pm
US sues to return Tyrannosaurus to Mongolia

NEW YORK – US authorities filed a lawsuit seeking to return to Mongolia a 70-million-year-old piece of its cultural heritage – fangs and all.

The skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus bataar – a smaller Asian cousin of the Tyrannosaurus rex – has been the subject of a months-long legal battle and is now being sought by Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara, who announced the federal government’s lawsuit on Monday.
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Turkey is applying more pressure to the foreign museums that it claims contain looted Turkish artefacts. Various exhibition loans to these museums are now being cancelled, in an attempt to convince the institutions involved to take the issue more seriously & attempt to resolve it.

From:
The Art Newspaper

Turkey turns up the heat on foreign museums
The list of antiquities demanded gets longer as more exhibitions are hit by the loans boycott
By Martin Bailey. Museums, Issue 236, June 2012
Published online: 13 June 2012

Turkey is set on a collision course with many of the world’s leading museums, by refusing exhibition loans because of antiquities claims. European museums that are being targeted include the Louvre, Berlin’s Pergamonmuseum, the British Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In America, claims are being lodged against New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Cleveland Museum of Art and Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC. Turkey’s tough new approach was first reported by The Art Newspaper (March 2012, p1, p10; April, p6).

Among the exhibitions that have been hit is a British Museum project on the Uluburun ship, the world’s oldest recovered wreck. Dating from the 14th century BC, it was discovered (with its cosmopolitan cargo) in 1982, six miles off the south-west Turkish coast. It was put on display 12 years ago at the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology. The British Museum was discussing an exhibition, along with reciprocal loans to Turkey, but this has had to be dropped because of Turkey’s claim for the Samsat stele.
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Could proactive protection of cultural property in regions of unrest be used by the USA as an opportunity for political diplomacy? Initially, after the invasion of Iraq led by the USA, little was done to protect many of the country’s treasures being looted by opportunist thieves – but, perhaps if more had been done to protect the historic sites & ancient artefacts, Iraqi citizens would have been more confident of the US military’s role as one of protectors rather than invaders?

From:
Chicago Tribune

Repatriating part of Saddam statue could promote democracy
U.S. should consider strategic protection of cultural artifacts
By Erik Nemeth
June 7, 2012

A few months ago a former British soldier made headlines for trying to sell part of the backside of the Saddam Hussein statue that was famously toppled in 2003. Though Saddam was long gone, the Iraqi government, happy to be rid of him, requested the return of the “artifact.” Their interest in repatriating a symbol of their “dictator in hindsight” illustrates the unforeseeable significance of cultural property in foreign relations.

The example suggests that the U.S. might consider proactive protection of cultural property in regions of conflict as an underutilized opportunity for political diplomacy, if not outright negotiation.
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Some sources have described this situation as restitution in reverse – but it is really only reversed, in terms of the fact that the party the artefact was taken from is a museum & the party that now holds it is an individual. The ruling does nothing to reverse the logical outcome – that the party holding onto the looted artefact is instructed to hand it back to the original owner.

From:
New York Times

Nazi Victim’s Family Told to Return Artifact
By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: June 1, 2012

The decision turns on its head the familiar scenario of Holocaust victims suing to reclaim property stolen or extorted from them by the Nazis. But in this case, according to court papers, the precious 3,200-year-old Assyrian artifact had been looted, not from the survivor, but from the Vorderasiatisches Museum in Berlin, at the close of World War II.

It is not clear how the survivor, Riven Flamenbaum, came into possession of the tablet after his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945, when he was sent to a displaced persons camp in southeastern Germany.
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Michael J Reppas of the American Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures will be presenting a lecture about the Parthenon Sculptures Tomorrow Morning in Columbus, Ohio.

A comprehensive Historical, Moral & Legal Presentation on: The Looting of the Parthenon and the Fight to Preserve Our Cultural Property

The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral in association with the Hellenic Heritage Foundation & The American Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Sculptures

Proudly present

A comprehensive Historical, Moral & Legal Presentation on: The Looting of the Parthenon and the Fight to Preserve Our Cultural Property

By Michael J Reppas, Esq.

June 3 2012 in the Church Hall following Services

The Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral
555 N High Street
Columbus
Ohio
43215

Tel: 614.224.9020

The Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act has stirred up quite a bit of controversy in the USA.

Many who have examined the bill (S. 2212) say that despite exemptions in the planned law, it is only really there to protect the interests of the big museums – while reducing the chances of recovering looted artefacts by the original owners (or their descendants).

From:
New York Times

Dispute Over Bill on Borrowed Art
The heirs of Malevich sought to recover paintings, including the ones displayed above center and right.
By DOREEN CARVAJAL
Published: May 21, 2012

The lending and borrowing of famous artworks is the essence of cultural exchange between museums in the United States and abroad. So routine is the practice, and so universally valued, that the American government has traditionally protected it with a law that shields a lent work from being seized by anyone with a claim to legal ownership while the art is on display here.

In recent years, though, American museum directors have come to fear that this safeguard has eroded, and that foreign museums, dreading entanglement in costly ownership battles, are more hesitant to make loans. So they have asked Congress to increase the security for global art swaps.
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Birmingham University has returned various skulls & bone fragments to the Salinan tribe in San Luis, Obispo County, California, where they have been re-buried.

Returns of artefacts involving human remains from institutions in the UK have now become commonplace (although there are still many more cases awaiting consideration). Pressure from the British Museum has made sure that these are differentiated from those that don’t involve human remains. So, whereas once, they said nothing could be returned, when faced with political pressure, they categorised their collection, to allow some of it to be returned, but make no difference to the case for retaining the rest of it. One could cynically argue, that this particularly appealed to them, as they had almost no items in their collection involving human remains (most of those were taken by the Natural History Museum in London when it was split off as a separate institution).

Only certain museums in the UK are covered by the Human Tissue Act, but once these institutions started making returns, the cultural climate shifted, paving the way for many more institutions to follow their lead.

So, the return of human remains is now relatively accepted (as is the one for items looted during the holocaust AKA Nazi Era) – but the campaign still needs to be won for the many other disputed artefacts that have the misfortune in not being in either of these special categories.

From:
Los Angeles Times

Native American skulls repatriated to California from England
How seven skulls from a California tribe got to the University of Birmingham is unclear. But their return appears to be the first event of its kind in the state.
By Steve Chawkins, Los Angeles Times
May 20, 2012

Nobody thought much about the locked metal cabinet in the medical school at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. It was another forgotten fixture in the anatomy department — until a researcher last year found seven skulls with yellowing labels indicating the remains were those of Native Americans from California’s Central Coast.

Earlier this month, the skulls and several bone fragments were boxed and gingerly placed aboard a jet to LAX at London’s Heathrow Airport. In a quiet ceremony, they were reburied in San Luis Obispo County, more than a century after their odyssey began.
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A comment on my earlier post about the Foreign Cultural Exchange Jurisdictional Immunity Clarification Act, also known as Senate Bill S. 2212 highlights some more issues with this proposed law.

I’ve copied the information below directly from the comment by Pierre Ciric.

People who are concerned about the potential impact of the act are encouraged to sign the petition here.

As a second generation holocaust survivor, I have concluded that S. 2212, in shielding any government-related foreign institution from ANY liability or suit in the United States for claims for artworks related to cultural exchanges, and subject to pillage, plunder or illegal excavation, is appalling.

In 1998, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and its members promised to perform in-depth provenance research for their entire collections, during hearings held by Jim Leach, Chair of the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services.
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The trial of a smuggler of looted Egyptian antiquities is currently ongoing in the USA. Once again, it is great to see real action being taken in such cases, but it serves to highlight the oddity of how artefacts taken using similar means, not that many years ago, are legitimately on display in many museums, with little fear of any sort of legal comeback.

You can read a more in-depth analysis of this case here.

From:
Independent Online

SA Time: 25 April 2012 15:01:30
Dealer admits smuggling Egyptian treasures
April 19 2012 at 12:21pm

New York – An antiques dealer pleaded guilty on Wednesday to smuggling ancient Egyptian treasures, including a coffin, to the United States.

Mousa Khouli, also known as Morris Khouli, aged 38, faces up to 20 years of prison for “smuggling Egyptian cultural property into the United States and making a false statement to law enforcement authorities,” the federal prosecutor’s office in New York said.
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American coin collectors in the USA argue that it is unfair to apply any sort of import restrictions to them, if other countries aren’t applying similar restriction. This approach seems fairly short sighted – if we worked on this basis, then no country would never need to apply any laws if other countries around them didn’t also have similar rules. Surely, it makes more sense to lead by example & then encourage others to follow suit.

From:
Huffington Post

Wayne Sayles
Executive Director, Ancient Coin Collectors Guild
End the Unilateral Trade Sanctions on Collectors
Posted: 04/ 3/2012 2:46 pm

President Obama recently announced that he is going to get tough on unfair trade restrictions. In his White House announcement earlier this month, the President said China should not be allowed to “skirt the rules” by placing restrictions on exports. “If China would simply let the market work on its own, we’d have no objection,” said Obama. The President went on to say, “When it is necessary, I will take action if our workers and our businesses are being subjected to unfair practices.”

But China is increasingly gaining free rein over certain industries because of the U.S.’ aggressive regulatory stances. While government agencies in Washington increase surcharges and restrictions for U.S. consumers, their Chinese counterparts take advantage of the unilateral sanctions. President Obama should take action by telling his own U.S. State Department to stop its unilateral trade restrictions on American coin collectors. An entire industry of small business collectors is under assault and in danger of collapsing because these sanctions unfairly target Americans alone.
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In what can only be a backwards step aimed at benefiting grab & sell type excavations, a new law proposed in Alabama would remove the need for treasure hunters to require permits for underwater excavations, as long as they keep away from Native American burial sites & shipwrecks.

From:
Al.com

New Alabama law could mean finders-keepers for historic artifacts found underwater
Published: Monday, January 16, 2012, 7:45 AM

MONTGOMERY, Alabama — A battle over historic artifacts hidden below the surface of Alabama’s rivers, lakes and bays is surfacing in advance of the opening of Legislature’s 2012 regular session on Feb. 7.

Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, has introduced a bill to amend the Alabama Cultural Resources Act, a law that requires underwater explorers to get a permit from the Alabama Historical Commission before going after submerged wrecks and relics.
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