Cyprus, an island nation situated in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, counts among the states that elected not to adopt the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage (henceforth: the 2001 UNESCO Convention), although recognizing its merits. With a coastline of 648 km, Cyprus’ seafloor holds an abundance of underwater cultural heritage. Despite that wealth, one searches in vain for a comprehensive study on the legal protection of its underwater cultural heritage. Instead, sporadic references to some of its provisions can be traced throughout the scholarly research surrounding the legal protection of underwater cultural heritage1 and maritime archaeology.2 Against this background, this article stands as the first thorough effort to reflect on Cyprus’ legal protection of its underwater cultural heritage.

While I believe that the authors, Emiline Smith and Erin Thompson, have legitimate concerns regarding the theft of cultural objects, I consider that, in the article “A Case Study of Academic Facilitation of the Global Illicit Trade in Cultural Objects: Mary Slusser in Nepal”, International Journal of Cultural Property (2023), 1–20, the authors present a number of serious misrepresentations.

A growing number of institutions that hold cultural heritage artifacts are now considering voluntary repatriations in which they choose to return an artifact despite unfilled gaps in their knowledge of its ownership history. But how are institutions to judge whether it is more probable that such gaps conceal theft and illicit export or are innocuous? Attempting to answer this question for Nepal, we examine published and archival records to trace the history of the growth in collecting of Nepali cultural heritage in the United States, with special attention to a 1964 exhibition at New York’s Asia Society Gallery, “The Art of Nepal,” and the activity of the New York dealers Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck. We conclude that the majority of Nepali heritage items in America entered after Nepal prohibited their export.

In the late nineteenth century, Western Powers launched military campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa resulting in the colonization of vast territories and the spoliation of cultural property. To justify the conquest, they asserted the supremacy of Western culture and disregarded principles of international law in their dealings with African states, communities, and individuals. This article examines colonialist legal justifications such as the denial of statehood of pre-colonial sub-Saharan African societies, the notion that conquest and spoliation were justifiable, and the belief that African legal systems lacked concepts of property. The article details why these arguments contradict well-established nineteenth-century legal principles, particularly state sovereignty and private property, which together form the conceptual basis for the prohibition of spoliation. The universal nature of those principles allows for the nondiscriminatory application and interpretation of historical law and consequently the protection of African pre-colonial states and private as well as public cultural property.

Sophie Vigneron, incoming editor of the International Journal of Cultural Property, interviewed Alex Bauer, who was the journal’s editor from 2003 to 2023. Alex is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Queens College and The Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Associate Director of the Sinop Region Archaeological Project, an interdisciplinary archaeological and heritage project on the landscapes and seascapes of the Black Sea coastal community of Sinop (Turkey).

The International Journal of Cultural Property (IJCP) is proud to award yearly the Pierre Lalive and John Henry Merryman Fellowship in Art and Cultural Heritage Law, hosted by the International Cultural Property Society and the Art-Law Centre of the University of Geneva.

Given the varying degrees of importance that a holy place holds for different parties and the variety of laws used to regulate them, laws pertaining to holy places integrate a broad array of legal, political, social, religious, and economic interests. Acknowledging the difficulty of capturing a singular standard of protection merits examining different existing modalities to discern the means of protection for holy places.

A 2022 Israeli District Court case concerning ownership rights over a Russian Orthodox church in the Old City of Jerusalem shall provide the platform for scrutinizing the relevant laws and variety of interests at play for holy places in Israel, providing insights into the importance of accounting for divergent interests in the cultural heritage protection milieu. This article shall highlight the approaches used towards holy place protection in a difficult and complex context, Israel, to better understand heritage protection methods for unique or significant cultural sites in other regions.

Much of today’s academic scholarship of international cultural heritage law circles around cultural heritage’s protection for the benefit of future generations. Despite this, the efforts to systematically examine the concept in more detail are scarcer. This paper seeks to fill this gap by taking a closer look at the ways in which the notion of future generations features in the body of international cultural heritage law. This contribution firstly illustrates how central the idea of protecting cultural heritage for the benefit of future generations is in international cultural heritage law. Despite this centrality, evidenced by an extensive analysis of international and regional hard and soft law, national law, case law, and policy options, its precisely contours the second argument of this paper, is that they remain elusive. Finally, skepticism is voiced over the concept’s potential ambivalent use with respect to the protection of cultural heritage.

Museums are often considered to be spaces of the authentic, where the real, unique and original is exhibited, and where the accurate past is conveyed. By means of two watercraft, Nydam Boat and Kon-Tiki, it is illustrated how their materiality and authenticity are shaped by processes of musealization, reconstruction, restoration and ways of narrating the past and staging exhibits. While their substances remain present and perceptible, they are also subjected to material changes and changing perceptions over time. From a cultural constructivist perspective, it is illustrated how museum exhibits may be perceived as authentic and how this is related to their materials.

In May 2021 a group of 96 classical antiquities was seized from Fordham University where they had formed part of their museum collection. The seizure was directly linked to the investigation by US authorities of objects that had been handled by the dealer Edoardo Almagià. The Fordham material was dominated by objects derived from Italy: Apulian, Campanian, and Paestan figure-decorated pottery; red-on-white ware associated with Crustumerium in Lazio; and Etruscan pottery, architectural terracottas, and terracotta votives. The objects were all donated to Fordham by William D. Walsh and had largely been acquired at auctions or through a narrow group of Manhattan galleries.