Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]

Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury Excerpts

Tuesday 28th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[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.

[Baroness Bonham-Carter of Yarnbury (LD)]

My Lords, I support not only the amendment but all the words of the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty. In fact, many of the things I was going to say he has already said.

The looted treasure that the likes of Daesh are acquiring is funding terrorism. As we know, the antiquities industry runs on trust, which cannot always be right. As well as the Channel 4 programme that the noble Earl and I both watched, I read a Guardian investigation. Every time its undercover buyer, who is actually an archaeologist of Iraqi origin,

“zones in on something that seems likely to be from an area now controlled by Isis, the dealer … grows vague about the item’s origin”.

Another suggests that a small statue from either Iraq or Syria,

“was bought at an auction. There is never any paperwork”.

This cannot be right.

The amendment seeks to make the antiquities trade and auction houses transparent about the background to the items that they are selling, to contribute to tackling this illegal trade in combating the source of funding for those who bring terror to our shores. I echo what the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, and the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, have been saying throughout the afternoon about the need for resources for policing. If the amendment is to be successful, there need to be more than three policemen following up on this terrible trade.