Cultural Property: Hague Convention

Earl of Clancarty Excerpts

Thursday 14th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[The Earl of Clancarty (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, for the opportunity to speak in this debate and congratulate her on her excellent and comprehensive speech. For his extensive briefing, I also thank Peter Stone of Newcastle University, who, I should add, holds, from the beginning of this year, the first UNESCO chair in Cultural Property Protection and Peace, which is a coup for this country.

The debate of the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, is well timed. A number of things are coming together and there is now both increasing interest and activity, prompted of course, in part, by the terrible destruction wreaked in the Middle East in the last year in particular—destruction which, as the noble Baroness said, also included the tragic death of the Syrian archaeologist Khaled al-Asaad, who gave his life to protect his country’s heritage.

There is a growing sense that we in this country need to do much more than we are. Within Parliament there has been the launch of a new All-Party Group for the Protection of Cultural Heritage, and in October a one-day summit was held where the Government could hear presentations from a variety of experts. The Government have announced a hugely welcome £30 million cultural protection fund. My sense is that crucially, the British Armed Forces are not only now convinced that protecting culturally significant sites helps and does not hinder military action, but they see the importance of being proactive. My understanding is that Lieutenant Colonel Tim Purbrick, who has written the Army Headquarters paper on cultural protection and whose talk some of us attended at the All-Party Parliamentary Archaeology Group, is currently introducing the new team which is planned to be part of the new 77th Brigade. Excitingly, they will be the UK’s monuments men and women for the 21st century.

The convention is now backed by every party and all departments. The time has clearly come to ratify the Hague convention. If, at the end of this debate, we hear the words “when parliamentary time allows”, there will surely be a groan around the House. We need a commitment from the Government that the necessary legislation will be introduced in 2016.Will the Minister confirm this?

Ratifying the treaty will not bring back what has been destroyed at Nimrud and Palmyra, but it will hugely help with the future. UK ratification, following the US as recently as 2009, will not only strengthen the treaty itself but will allow the UK the necessary international moral authority which it so far lacks. But that should be just the start, because the UK has an opportunity—a crucial opportunity—to take the lead in building a strategic vision for cultural property protection, in a sense leapfrogging everyone else. Given our experience and research facilities in our museums, universities and institutions, there is the potential to do so. But to enable this we need most immediately to do two things. The first is to ratify the second protocol of 1999, which, among other things, crucially defines the conditions of individual criminal responsibility. None of the permanent five has yet done so, not out of any specific concern for the protocol—44 states have ratified the second protocol and France and China, I understand, are considering doing so. I am pleased that the Government intend to do this.

The second necessary thing to achieve is to use part of the cultural protection fund to set up a co-ordination centre in London that could then become the international headquarters of the organisation of the Blue Shield, the emblem of the 1954 convention and the umbrella organisation for heritage NGOs. If this happened, as the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, has suggested, it would be the cultural property equivalent of the setting up in 1863 in Geneva of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Will the Minister take careful note that establishing such a co-ordination centre as the priority use for the new cultural property fund is backed by the British Museum, the Museums Association, the Council for British Archaeology, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, and the Art Loss Register, among many others? The worry at present, however, is that the fund will be used mainly for local, if not insignificant, projects and that, at the end, there will be no legacy. The consultation document launched today, which will run to 19 February, while full of good things in terms of localised protection, training and education, makes no mention of co-ordination. As Peter Stone says, an endowed core team would provide the strategic vision, credibility, and focal point for the efforts of the international community’s actions regarding cultural property protection long into the future. We have this window of opportunity to take an effective leadership role in cultural property protection and become its international centre, both real and formal, and we should not lose it.

On a separate if related issue, it is important that we try to do something about the trade in illegal artefacts. We know through anecdotal evidence that there is a trade in London in illegal antiquities and this must be addressed. It is worth noting that in the 13 years since the Dealing in Cultural Objects (Offences) Act came into force, there has not been a single prosecution. I find it extraordinary that while so much scholarship in these areas is built on the principle of provenance—I am thinking of art objects more generally—the antiques trade, including auction houses, is still very secretive, when it suits, about previous ownership. I wonder if there should be buyers’ rights legislation for antiquities.

Finally, to put this debate into a human context, it is important to protect our living culture as well as the past. It is, of course, people who built our cultural heritage in the first place. There is no more extreme case at present than the plight of the poet and artist Ashraf Fayadh, who has been in jail in Saudi Arabia for the last two years. He was charged with apostasy and, in November, sentenced to death, against which an appeal has been made. He has strong links with the UK, helping to foster British-Saudi cultural relations through arts projects between the two countries. The literature and arts communities around the world have expressed huge concern. I mention Ashraf Fayadh in particular today because a worldwide reading of his work, organised by the Berlin International Literature Festival, is taking place at this very moment in many cities in Europe, Canada, the United States, Egypt, China and many other places, including London.

In this spirit, I want to read just a few lines from his poem “Asylum”, translated from the Arabic, from his collection Instructions Within. It has a particular resonance in Europe as well as the Middle East, given the upheavals we are currently witnessing:

“Asylum: To stand at the end of a queue.

To be given a morsel of bread.

To stand!: Something your grandfather used to do.

Without knowing the reason why.

The Morsel?: You.

The homeland: A card to put in your wallet.

Money: Papers that carry images of Leaders.

The Photo: Your substitution pending your return.

And the Return: A mythological creature ... from your grandmother’s tales.

End of the first lesson.”

Ashraf Fayadh is not the only artist currently held in prison and is certainly not the only wrongly held prisoner, but I ask the Minister, in her capacity as the Arts and Culture Minister, to convey the huge concern being expressed by the arts community in this country to the Foreign Office and ask what action the Government are taking to help secure his release.