Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]
Debate between Earl of Clancarty and Lord Collins of Highbury
Lord Collins of Highbury
My Lords, this follows on aptly from previous debate. The purpose of the amendment is to provoke an even stronger debate. The context of the convention is 1954, the context of post-war Europe, where we had a totalitarian state looting property, forcing works of art to be sold, forcing people to give up their property in a quasi-judicial legal way, leading to difficulties over provenance, et cetera. It was a weapon of war.
In fact, in some of the conflicts we have seen in Europe, that sort of looting has become a common feature of war. Actually, as we heard in previous debates, cultural property is not just becoming a weapon of war whereby you culturally attack and undermine people’s wealth or possessions, but is now used to fund war and conflict. It has become an income stream for quasi-states. One of the reasons why we have tabled this amendment is to provoke the sort of debate that we have just had and to ask how effective these measures are. The purpose is not to criminalise art dealers or to attack people. In a sense, by the time a work of art has reached a dealer, it is too late. We are seeking to get the Government to think hard about how to stop the trade being used by the groups that we have been talking about. We have examples. In the antiques trade, it is quite common. We have been talking about endangered species and the use of ivory. We have set a very clear date when ivory cannot be traded. My problem is that if we do not address the fundamental issue of cultural property being used not only as a weapon of war but as an income stream, the issues we heard about in the previous debate about how you prove provenance become very difficult, hence the proposal for the reversal of proof.
We heard a bit about this in the previous statement. We have existing legislation and the codes of practice that have been adopted from existed legislation. There is a useful description on page 7 of the impact assessment of all the different codes of practice for the control of international trading in works of art. The Antiquities Dealers’ Association’s code of practice includes members agreeing to make purchases in good faith and to establish identity. All this is extremely appropriate and good, but has it been enough? Is it sufficient to stop the sort of things that we know are going on? That is the purpose of this amendment: to generate that debate and to ask the Government properly to review whether the existing arrangements and the codes that follow from the convention are sufficient. I hope the Minister will be able to take these points into consideration. I beg to move.
The Earl of Clancarty
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 18 in this group, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Redesdale, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, for their support for this amendment.
I am attacking the problem from the other end to the noble Lord, Lord Collins. The purpose of the amendment is to remove the long-standing culture of secrecy in the art and antiques trade in the UK, which is a hindrance to the protection of cultural property. London is the second-biggest antiquities market in the world and is perhaps the biggest for Islamic objects. Last year, UNESCO stated that looting in the Middle East is operating on an industrial scale. We know that there is significant illegal trade in London in antiquities from the Middle East from considerable anecdotal evidence and from undercover research, such as that carried out for the excellent Channel 4 “Dispatches” programme, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Bonham-Carter, referred at Second Reading, in which Dick Ellis, the founder and former head of the Metropolitan Police art and antiques Unit, which the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, referred to earlier, said that the current three-person team of that unit is simply not large enough to deal with the problem.
I say at the outset that the antiques trade and auction houses do an important job. I am not against the trade, which according to the British Art Market Federation’s website, was worth £9 billion in 2014. Indeed, I am one of a large number of people up and down the country who have bought items at auction, of whatever value. However, the convention of maintaining the secrecy of both sellers and buyers is wrong, and runs counter to everything that art historians and archaeologists try to do, which is to build a historical record and discover the provenance of an object. It is worth saying that the major part of the meaning of cultural property lies in its provenance, often as part of that property’s original environment. Where art historians, experts in ancient manuscripts and other experts try to lift the lid on history, the art and antiques trade obfuscates. Auction houses sometimes provide provenance—sometimes whole auctions will be dedicated to the sale of items owned by a particular celebrity collector, for example. However, the auction houses do this selectively when it suits them, when it is clear that it gives a sale a particular cachet; it is not the general rule.
To peg this amendment to the Bill, it is rightly framed in terms of looted property, but there are other reasons to have the amendment. There is the protection of our own cultural property to consider, whether or not it is looted, and we should not be complacent about that protection. I stand corrected by the Minister when she said at Second Reading that there had been one prosecution under the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act 2003—just one, it has to be added, in the last 13 years. My substantive point, which was that there had been no prosecutions for looting in the Middle East—the purpose for which the Act was set up in the first place—still holds. The one prosecution, which happened in the last few weeks, is of someone who stole religious artefacts from churches in the UK. Nevertheless, this is instructive in itself, since to make this looting worth while there have to be buyers for such stolen property.
The art and antiques trade of course says that it is doing what it can to tighten up checks on provenance internally and adheres to its voluntary code of due diligence, but that is not good enough—we need transparency. We expect transparency in so many other walks of life, and we should expect it in the dealing of cultural objects. This brings me to the third good reason for this amendment, which is simply that it is an issue of consumers’ rights. Thinking in particular about the possibility of introducing object passports, I do not see why, if in the instance of buying a car we have the right to know its history and previous owners, and have a logbook as proof of that, we do not grant the same rights for the purchase of an artefact above a certain market value. What is it about being a seller or a buyer that is so shameful that one cannot be revealed to the other, let alone to the rest of the public? When I have bought something at an auction, or even wanted to, what I want to hear from the auction house if I ask them for information on the item is not, “Oh, we can’t tell you who the seller is, sir, we have to protect their confidentiality”, but “We will absolutely provide you with as much information as possible about the object’s history”. Until we have a culture of openness, one that will allow the object to be tracked back from the current buyer, however that purchase is made—of course many purchases are now made online—we have an unhelpfully secretive art and antiques market that breaks the links of the historical record for the object at every transaction in its history.