Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Bill [HL]

Lord Borwick Excerpts

Monday 6th June 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Borwick (Con)]

My Lords, I first declare my interests: my wife, Victoria, the MP for Kensington, is president of BADA, the British Antiques Dealers Association, and she used to run the Olympia antiques fairs for some years; I am a part-time fundraiser for both the Science Museum and Historic Royal Palaces, the people who run the Tower of London. I commend any parliamentarian to make friends with the Tower of London. Historically that has been a wise idea.

I generally welcome the Bill. The destruction of cultural property by Daesh and al-Qaeda has been appalling and the pictures we see of the wreckage they leave behind are distressing. However, if they had not been so proud of this destruction, I am not sure that it would have been so comprehensively condemned. Perhaps more insidious, and probably more widespread, is the reported ransacking of museums, followed by the leaking of cultural property to the West. Restoring pride to the citizens and education to their children will help bring these dreadful conflicts to an end. The contents of their museums play a valuable part in that restoration.

However, The Bill could be improved. It is complex and certainly will not be understood easily by an antique shop owner without legal advice. Could it not be simplified? It talks in detail about unlawfully exported cultural property but I am not sure that this really hits the spot. Unlawfully means, I am told, without an export licence.

Does this raise the status of the bureaucracy of the occupied territory and is Daesh or ISIL an occupying state for this purpose? The point has been made more elegantly by my noble friend Lord Renfrew but it is a part of the 1950s origin of this treaty, written before Daesh was imagined. Could we not look at amendments to the Bill to widen it to include the more recent example of non-state organisations such as Daesh effectively occupying states?

Refugees from Assad or Gaddafi or any of the other despots in the area may not have been oppressed by those tyrants but by the goons working for those tyrants’ regimes. To say that something is legal if those goons have issued a licence but illegal otherwise seems to address the wrong point.

I do not want to be tempted into talking much about a place which I have never wanted to visit, particularly in front of a House containing experts on the subject, so let me instead talk about the problem of refugees taking small items with them—a family heirloom, perhaps. No doubt the vast majority of refugees are without any assets other than their iPhones, but I am amazed by the cash prices reported to be paid by the refugees to the people traffickers. How do these refugees manage to pay thousands of pounds, as is regularly reported, and is the exchange control in Syria inhibiting them from taking out cash from that benighted country? I have no doubt that asking Assad’s bureaucracy if you can bring out a small valuable statue will be as quickly refused as asking if you can take out $10,000. How many export licences does the Minister think have been issued from Syria or Somalia or any of the other countries recently? If we do not know or think the answer is zero, is the Bill answering the right question?

Furthermore, is the granting of export licences by a corrupt state a sign that a tyrant’s bureaucracy has a monopoly of knowledge on what is or is not valuable and culturally important? Should not the advice of UK-based art experts be relevant? What we are trying to do here, surely, is attack the crooked curators, not the honest wealthy refugees, even though they may be as rare as each other.