Spotlighting Fake Antiquities with Record Keeping Laws

Fraudulent antiquities are sold in the same way that knockoff jeans, counterfeit medicines, and fraudulent sports merchandise are peddled to consumers.  The goal of the sellers is to maximize profits by selling worthless goods.

Fake Meryet Amun statue placed into evidence in U.S. v. Schultz.

Fake antiquities can be found on internet auction sites and other sales venues.  Moreover, there have been prominent cultural property cases featuring fakes, including the Arnold Peter Weiss case, where the convicted defendant possessed forged ancient coins, and the seminal case of U.S. v. Schultz, where a smuggler possessed a statue of the Egyptian princess Meryet Amun, which was a fake.

Just as record keeping laws can spotlight black market antiquities and bleach them from the legitimate marketplace, so too can the same laws protect consumers by helping authorities uncover fakes and forgeries offered for sale. A full description of the proposed statutes have been described in a prior blog post.  In brief, the laws would require auction houses, dealers, galleries, shops, and other entities engaged in the antiquities trade to maintain records of the following:

• Descriptions of the names and addresses of the parties involved in a transaction, a description of the cultural object, and the amount of money exchanged.

• All available import documents and export permits connected with the object.

• A description of the provenance/chain of custody/collecting history of the object known to the seller or consignor along with supporting documents, photos, affidavits, and the like when available.

• Any condition reports associated with conservation reports, insurance documents, shipping paperwork, etc.

Such record keeping would help identify fraudulent merchandise and uncover falsely created documents that purport to "authenticate" cultural objects. The information would assist consumer protection authorities located at the Federal Trade Commission and at state attorneys general offices to more easily investigate and prosecute suspected fraudulent merchants.

This post is researched, written, and published on the blog Cultural Heritage Lawyer Rick St. Hilaire at culturalheritagelawyer.blogspot.com. Text copyrighted 2012 by Ricardo A. St. Hilaire, Attorney & Counselor at Law, PLLC. Any unauthorized reproduction or retransmission of this post is prohibited. CONTACT: www.culturalheritagelawyer.com

Heritage Protection Laws in Uganda

The 16th annual triennial meeting of ICOM’s conservation committee took place in Lisbon, Portugal this week. Many outstanding papers were presented.

I was privileged to moderate the Legal Issues in Conservation Working Group session. One paper of interest dealt with cultural heritage laws in Uganda. Frederick Nsibambi of Cross-Cultural Foundation of Uganda spoke of the laws covering the protection of heritage, commenting that a 1967 statute simply fined a person $1 for a violation. More about his organization’s projects can be found at crossculturalfoundation.or.ug.

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Statute of Limitatons to Recover Stolen Culture Lengthened in California

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed into law California Assembly Bill 2765. This law allows an owner of a stolen or fraudulently taken cultural object to file a lawsuit to recover the piece within six years of finding the object. This new law is significant for three reasons.

First, it doubles the time an aggrieved party can recover an object of "historical, interpretive,scientific, cultural, or artistic significance" that has been stolen or taken by fraud or duress

Second, the law enacts the "actual discovery" rule. That means that the six year clock only starts to run once the original owner actually discovers the wherabouts of the cultural object.

Third, the law is retrospective. The legislature specifically stated that the law "shall apply to all pending and future actions commenced on or before December 31, 2017, including any actions dismissed based on the expiration of statutes of limitation in effect prior to the date of enactment of this statute if the judgment in that action is not yet final or if the time for filing an appeal from a decision on that action has not
expired, provided that the action concerns a work of fine art that was taken within 100 years prior to the date of enactment of this statute." There is no doubt then that the new law may impact Marei Von Saher's effort to move forward on her claim to recover Lucas Cranach the Elder's diptych "Adam and Eve" from the Norton Simon Museum, originally looted by the Nazis.

Read the law at http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/09-10/bill/asm/ab_2751-2800/ab_2765_bill_20100930_chaptered.html