The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation 9 Annual
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The Lawyers' Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation 9th Annual Conference Friday, April 13, 2018 8:00am-6:30pm Georgetown University Law Center McDonough Hall, Hart Auditorium 600 New Jersey Ave NW, Washington, DC 20001 TABLE OF CONTENTS: Panel 1: Claiming and Disclaiming Ownership: Russian, Ukrainian, both or neither? Panel 2: Whose Property? National Claims versus the Rights of Religious and Ethnic Minorities in the Middle East Panel 3: Protecting Native American Cultural Heritage Panel 4: Best Practices in Acquiring and Collecting Cultural Property Speaker Biographies CLE MATERIALS FOR PANEL 1 Laws/ Regulations Washington Conference Principles on Nazi-confiscated Art (1998) https://www.state.gov/p/eur/rt/hlcst/270431.htm Articles/ Book Chapters/ White Papers Quentin Byrne-Sutton, Arbitration and Mediation in Art-Related Disputes, ARBITRATION INT’L 447 (1998). F. Shyllon, ‘The Rise of Negotiation (ADR) in Restitution, Return and Repatriation of Cultural Property: Moral Pressure and Power Pressure’ (2017) XXII Art Antiquity and Law pp. 130-142. Bandle, Anne Laure, and Theurich, Sarah. “Alternative Dispute Resolution and Art-Law – A New Research Project of the Geneva Art-Law Centre.” Journal of International Commercial Law and Technology, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2011): 28 – 41 http://www.jiclt.com/index.php/jiclt/article/view/124/122 E. Campfens “Whose cultural heritage? Crimean treasures at the crossroads of politics, law and ethics”, AAL, Vol. XXII, issue 3, (Oct. 2017) http://www.iuscommune.eu/html/activities/2017/2017-11-23/workshop_3_Campfens.pdf Anne Laure Bandle, Raphael Contel, Marc-André Renold, “Case Ancient Manuscripts and Globe – Saint-Gall and Zurich,” Platform ArThemis (http://unige.ch/art-adr), Art-Law Centre, University of Geneva. https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/ancient-manuscripts-and- globe-saint-gall-and-zurich/case-note-ancient-manuscripts-and-globe Thomas R. Kline, Will Third Visit to Ninth Circuit Be Déjà Vu All Over Again for Norton Simon Museum?, 17 IFAR J. 16 (2016) https://www.law.upenn.edu/live/files/6413-kline-thomas-2017- will-third-visit-to-ninth Anne Laure Bandle, Nare G. Aleksanyan, and Marc-Andre Renold, “Cranach Diptych- Goudstikker Heirs and Norton Simon Museum,” Artemis, Art-Law Centre, University of Geneva, 2016 https://plone.unige.ch/art-adr/cases-affaires/cranach-diptych-2013-goudstikker-heirs-and- norton-simon-museum/case-note-2013-cranach-diptych-2013-goudstikker-heirs-and-norton- simon-museum Evelien Campfens and Irina Tarsis, Cri-Me-a-River! Crimean Gold in the Crosshairs of Geopolitics, 18 IFAR J. 36 (2017). Maria Nudelman, Who Owns the Scythian Gold? The Legal and Moral Implications of Ukraine and Crimea's Cultural Dispute, 38 FORDHAM INT'L L.J. 1261 (2015) https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2401&context=ilj Paul Sonne, Scythian Gold Caught in Ukraine Dispute ‘Crimea: Gold and Secrets from the Black Sea,’ Exhibit on Display in Amsterdam, WALL ST. J. (Mar. 30, 2014), https://www.wsj.com/articles/scythian-gold-caught-in-ukraine-dispute-1396198744 Allard Pierson Museum Holding Artifacts Claimed by Both Russia and Ukraine, COMMITTEE FOR CULTURAL POLICY, (Aug. 23, 2014) Max Biedermann, Ukraine: Between Scylla and Charybdis, 40 N.C. J. INT’L L. & COM. REG. 230 https://www.law.unc.edu/journals/ncilj/issues/volume40/issue-1-fall-2014/ukraine-between- scylla-and-charybdis/ Zoe Niesel, Collateral Damage: Protecting Cultural Heritage in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, THE COMMON L., WAKE FOREST L. REV., (2014), http://wakeforestlawreview.com/2014/04/collateral-damage-protecting-cultural-heritage-in- crimea-and-eastern-ukraine/ CLE MATERIALS FOR PANEL 2 Laws/ Regulations/ Cases UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, 1970 UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects, 1995 2003 Agreement on Iraqi Jewish Archive https://www.scribd.com/doc/208446577/2003-Agreement-on-Iraqi-Jewish- Archive?irgwc=1&content=121977&campaign=digidip%20GmbH&ad_group=&keyword=&so urce=impactradius&medium=affiliate Articles/ Book Chapters/ White Papers J.H. Merryman, The Public Interest in Cultural Property, 77 CAL. L. R. 339 (1989). Cultural Heritage, Cultural Rights, Cultural Diversity: New Developments in International Law, (Silvia Borelli et al. ed., 2012). Carole Basri, Do not give holy Jewish artifacts to a country that expelled its Jews, The Times of Israel (Mar. 6, 2018), http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/do-not-give-holy-jewish-artifacts-to-a-country-that-expelled-its- jews/ Harold Rhode and Lenny Ben-David, Documentary: The Discovery and Rescue of Iraqi Jews’ Patrimony in Baghdad. Will It Now Be Lost?, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (Sept. 28, 2017), http://jcpa.org/video/documentary-discovery-rescue-iraqi-jews-patrimony-baghdad-will-now- lost/ Sigal Samuel, Send Iraqi Jewish Archive Back Where It Belongs, Forward (February 6, 2014), https://forward.com/culture/192266/send-iraqi-jewish-archive-back-where-it-belongs/ JTA, US, Libya to Sign Deal Possibly Legitimizing Jewish Property Confiscation, The Jerusalem Post (Feb. 23, 2018), http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/US-Libya-to-sign-deal-possibly- legitimizing-Jewish-property-confiscation-543454 Yemen Claims Jewish Religious Artifacts, Cultural Property News (2018), https://culturalpropertynews.org/yemen-red-list-includes-jewish-religious-artifacts/ US Blocks Import of Art and Artifacts from Libya, Cultural Property News (2018), https://culturalpropertynews.org/us-blocks-import-of-art-and-artifacts-from-libya/ ! PROPRIETARY HERITAGE: THE IRAQI JEWISH ARCHIVE AND THE LOGIC OF CULTURAL PROPERTY Tamara Mann Columbia University Abstract: In 2003, U.S. military forces discovered, saved and helped import a collection of documents pertaining to the now dispersed Jewish community of Iraq. In so doing, they helped transform a loosely affiliated set of papers, parchments and books into a single unit of cultural property, a term that thrust the materials into a current of international debates. From its inception in the laws of war to its current incarnation in peacetime international legal treaties, cultural property, as a concept, has worked to convert objects of cultural significance into the collective heritage of abstract groups. The beauty of integrating a past culture into one’s present identity has blinded scholars from recognising the way in which the cultural property debate has mushroomed into an illogical system that falsely equates heritage with ownership and thwarts legitimate private claims for the sake of national ones. The story of the Iraqi Jewish Archive exposes the perils of this conflation – ownership and heritage – challenging scholars to rethink the efficacy of the term cultural property. Keywords: cultural property, heritage, Iraq, United States, internationalism, nationalism. 198 Intellectual History and Political Thought Introduction: The Iraqi Jewish Archive In a war zone, in a desert, a freezer truck arrived in Baghdad to rescue twenty-seven trunks of decomposing Hebrew and Arabic documents.1 Only one month before, the United States Military watched as looters ransacked Iraq’s National Museum and tore through the wreckage of the burned National Library of Baghdad.2 When a horrified international community decried the ‘loss of the world’s greatest collection of Babylonian, Sumerian, and Assyrian antiquities’ and pressed the United States to guard Iraq’s cultural property, a modest collection of materials dedicated to the Iraqi Jewish community was probably not what they had in mind.3 In the shadow of international ire, U.S. forces discovered, saved and eventually imported a collection of documents pertaining to the now-dispersed Jewish community of Iraq. To transport these objects legally from Baghdad to the American National Archives, the United States and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) formed a confidential agreement: the United States would import the materials through the Immunities from Seizure Act, a law pertaining to foreign objects slated for exhibition, for the duration of the restoration process; following a US exhibition the objects would then be returned to the new Iraqi government.4 This bargain helped transform a loosely affiliated set of papers, parchments, and books into a single unit of cultural property, a term that thrust the materials into a current of international debates. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 1 Miller 2003; Lee 2003; Hartman 2004; Abramson 2005. 2 Paroff 2004; Sandholtz 2005, p. 185; Thurlow 2005, p. 153. 3 Thurlow 2005, p. 10. 4 See the CPA website, Coalition Provisional Authority, n.d., for information on the structure of the CPA; see United States National Archives and Records Administration 2003 for information on the agreement between the United States and the CPA; Ledger 2005 gives an excellent interpretation of the law used to transport the archive. Proprietary Heritage 199! Renamed the Iraqi Jewish Archive, the materials discovered in Baghdad quickly became the subject of controversy during their stay in the United States. The covert nature of the agreement between the US and the CPA prompted interested parties to question the rightful owner of the archive. While many argued that the archive should be returned to Iraq, where the materials were found, others argued that the archive should be returned to Israel, where the majority of the dispersed Iraqi Jewish community now lived.5 Lurking behind the debate over rightful