International Symposium: New Heritage Challenges in Crisis Contexts
Heritage protection in crisis situation is of critical importance, and this issue has known many key legal evolutions in the past few years. In the face of the upsurge of heritage disasters, the Director-General of UNESCO, Ms. Audrey Azoulay, reaffirmed the importance of the international protection and preservation of cultural properties and sites that are in a critical situation, facing for instance deliberate destruction, such as the sites of Palmyra and Aleppo in Syria; looting, large-scale illicit trafficking; as well as natural disasters. Complementing the existing arsenal, including the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, the Unidroit Convention or the instruments of European Union law, several texts have been adopted or are under discussion at the international and European level. In addition, several states have changed their legislation. These convergent initiatives mark a new stage in the fight against the looting and trafficking of cultural property by proposing new operational means to fill legal gaps and allow more effective transnational cooperation. In the face of this important normative enrichment, it is always worth reconsidering the efficiency of both the preventive system and the operational means at hand in order to fight against these cultural crimes, as well as reflecting on the legal instruments that have already been implemented at various levels.
The symposium is organized by the French National Commission for UNESCO, under the patronage of UNESCO, and in association with the French Ministry of Culture, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Institute of Social Sciences of Politics (ISP), the International Society for Research on Art and Cultural Heritage Law (ISCHAL), the "House of Human Sciences" of the University Paris-Saclay, and the Institute of Public Law Studies of the University Paris-Saclay (IEDP).
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