THURSDAY 13 APRIL 2000

PROFESSOR THE LORD RENFREW OF KAIMSTHORN

71  Lord Renfrew, I would very much like to welcome you here today. Please do not regard the less than complete attendance as discourteous, some of our colleagues are being forced by their Whips to be in Standing Committees along the corridor and may perhaps come in a little later and one of our colleagues has got a domestic problem that we have just been notified of. We are, of course, very pleased to see you. When we were paying our visit to Greece we saw your books on sale, I hope to your profit, in several of the museums that we visited and it was obvious to us, just as we felt when you kindly attended our seminar, that you are regarded as a major authority on these matters. That being so, we particularly welcome you. Mr Fearn will ask the first question.

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) Thank you very much.

72  Good morning. You argue that the deliberate looting of sites for commercial gain is "the most serious threat to the world's heritage today". To what extent is the problem of looting greater now than it was in the past?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) I think the implication is absolutely right, that it was a major problem in the past. It has been going on for a very long time. It started in ancient Egypt, I think, and certainly Etruscan tombs have been looted for a couple of centuries in exactly the way that one would deplore today. But it is now at a much higher level than it was before. Whereas before, apart from gold seekers, which there have always been through the ages, it was very much limited to the classical lands, Greece, Italy, Egypt, perhaps the Near East, now it is really a worldwide problem. Peru has been extensively looted. Mali has been the focus of an enormous amount of looting in recent years. Something that I think is very offensive in recent decades is the amount of looting in Cambodia, for instance, where temples are actually being dismantled and smuggled over borders. I think the volume is worse, as it were. Of course, the world's heritage is a diminishing resource, it simply cannot be replaced. I hope that begins to answer your question.

73  Where would you say most of these artefacts go or trade through? Is it London? Is that one of the worst places?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) London is one of the centres. I think Switzerland is bad, if I may use that word, Geneva and other centres in Switzerland. Brussels has quite a bad reputation. New York is a major centre. London is one of the major clearing houses. Then, of course, they end up in private collections, very often acquired by collectors who are not entirely sensitive to the point that if they buy unprovenanced antiquities they are ultimately indirectly funding the looting process. I think not all collectors understand that very well.

74  Have you any sympathy with the notion that the export laws of countries such as Greece and Italy are ineffective?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) I have every sympathy. Greece, indeed many countries, have very stringent laws where all antiquities found belong to the state, and they are not always very effectively applied. Of course they have a major problem. When they have compensation provisions they are not always very well applied. A country like Mali, for instance, a very poor country, simply cannot cope. It is natural that when peasants find objects they sell them on. Studies have been made which show that it is not the locals who make the money usually, it is the middle men right the way down the line who make the big profits.

75  Are those middle men mostly here in this country or in America?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) They are in those countries I mentioned. There are many dealers in this country, there are many dealers in America, there are many in Switzerland. It must be said that some of the things they deal in are antiquities that have been available for a long time with respectable provenance. I do not want to insist that every dealer is always handling illicit goods. I would take the position now that where it cannot be shown where they have come from, where you cannot trace the history back, it is fair to say that unprovenanced antiquities very often are looted. You cannot always show that in every case. That is certainly my view and I think that is where the balance needs to shift. Hitherto museums have often said "if we do not know it is looted, we might be free to buy it", but these days one realises that this is a Catch 22: how would you know it was looted in a clandestine excavation? The more respectable museums, most museums in this country, are now taking the view that if it is unprovenanced they had better not touch it.

76  Should there be tighter regulation here on the dealers and the auction houses?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) I believe so. For instance, I believe it is strange that we have no import controls whatever so far as I am aware on these matters: in effect that is so. Certainly a few years ago when Lord Inglewood was the relevant spokesman in the House of Lords he conceded that "it is not an offence in Britain to offer for sale publicly antiquities which have been illegally excavated and illegally exported from another country". There has to be something wrong about that.

  Mr Fearn: I would agree with you on that. Thank you, Chairman.

77  Following directly on from that point, Lord Renfrew, we had a discussion with the Metropolitan Police last week, and we hope they are going to come and give evidence, and they made the very point that you have just made to us, namely while it is illegal in this country to trade in goods that are stolen, it is not illegal to trade in goods that have been illegally exported. Would you advocate making that a criminal offence?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) I would myself, yes. There may be many difficulties applying these things in practice. One of the weaknesses at the moment is that there is no official position that it is wrong. I can well understand that there are problems in making legislation of that kind work and I can well understand there may be arguments questioning that if you cannot make it work is it good legislation. I myself think it is really rather a scandal that there is no official position in this country that says this is wrong. For example, in relation to the 1970 UNESCO Convention, and you may want to turn to that later, I think it is a scandal that the British Government has not subscribed to the UNESCO Convention. I do not think subscribing to it would change the world in practice but it would at least take the position that the British Government, like many other governments, deprecates the looting process. That is not at present the official position. You may have the Minister saying he agrees and so on in a statement or an interview, but there is no official Government position that actually says "yes, we feel this is wrong and we feel it ought to be stopped". I feel very strongly the first move is to have a moral position, if I can use that word, an ethical position even, on the matter. The practicalities may be more difficult to work out but I think that is stage two.

78  Secondly, you talked about the need to establish provenance. One of our colleagues in particular, Mr Wyatt, but the rest of us too, has been interested in the possibility of the equivalent of a motorcar log book but, again, when we discussed this with the Metropolitan Police they said that it was impracticable because of the huge and unquantifiable numbers of articles traded. We did put to them, and it seemed that it found some favour, that one might at least gain some kind of control if, say, the largest auction houses, those who have specified annual turnovers, can be licensed and if that were so they could have an obligation as part of their licence to establish provenance. Have you any views on that?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) First of all, if I may say so, I think the principle is absolutely right. There may be difficulties in applying it but I think the notion, that if an antiquity is offered for sale, if it is a respectable antiquity, you should know who sold it to the dealer and who sold it to them and back along the road where it came from, is absolutely right. I very much support and agree with the concept. As to how to apply it, I can see there are many difficulties. At the moment when you look through the pages of the catalogue of an auction house and a few pieces are from old collections, the Duke of Sutherland's mummy case from one hundred years ago, it tells of how it came out of Egypt, but many of them do not say anything about provenance. I think that really is not good enough. There should be the onus upon them to do exactly as you say. Not only that but, in addition, following the approach you are indicating, one might have some sort of price or value threshold. You could apply the same principle to dealers other than auction houses and if they advertise for sale an antiquity for more than, I do not know, £2,000, £3,000, whatever the figure is, then there should be an obligation on them to explain how they got it. I do not see the merit in secrecy. If you discuss it with them they say "we could not do that, client confidentiality" and so on. As my colleague, Neil Brodie, has said, you do not worry about client confidentiality while you are buying a used car, you expect to know where it is from. I honestly do not see the difference.

79  The third point is during the seminar we had your colleagues did refer to the misfortunes of an impoverished Third World country like Mali, which is not only losing wealth but losing part of its heritage. Would you say whether you feel there is an argument for dealing with such matters to be eligible for aid from the International Development Department in this country or the European Union or other agencies?

  (Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn) That is a very interesting idea which I had not thought of. My first reaction is yes, except that I think one does have to recognise how difficult it is for these countries. For instance, if it was not disadvantaging them, if there was going to be some aid earmarked for their museum service or their cultural department. In many of these countries there is a threshold to pass. It has worked very well in Peru. Once the locals see that there is some benefit to keeping the stuff there, that there can be some local museums and there begins to be some local tourism, so that it is not just "you must not sell the stuff", but, on the contrary, "this is your heritage and you can do something with it, such as attract tourism". If there were an aid component in that direction so that it was as much a carrot as a stick it would be a very enlightened approach.