Return to Sender??— Navigating the Legal Odyssey of Cultural Repatriation

In the realm of world heritage, the British Museum in London England carries a cultural gravitas alongside a checkered past that few institutions can rival. The institution itself is home to a staggering  “eight million objects" spanning “from small communities to vast empires,” in an ambitious attempt to highlight the human experience over the course of history. 

However, during the late twentieth and twenty-first century, the seemingly endless collections of the British Museum alongside other English museums and galleries have faced heavy international scrutiny over their failure to engage in the legal repatriation of questionably procured artifacts.

The British Museum itself was founded almost three centuries ago when Sir Hans Sloane, a prominent physician and collector bequeathed his entire estate which consisted of "a huge collection of more than 80,000 'natural and artificial rarities' with a vast library of over 40,000 books and manuscripts, and 32,000 coins and medals,” in a codicil to will. In the United Kingdom, commonwealth and other English speaking nations like the United States, the only way to make legally binding changes to one’s will is through the above-mentioned legal instrument called a codicil — a modifying or clarifying clause that is added to a will. 

While it is indeed unfathomable that one institution could have amassed such an extensive collection spanning thousands of years and hundreds of geographical locations, the institution and its collecting practices have left an indelible stain on the Museum’s history and legacy in recent years. The most evident example of the aforementioned has to be the dubious acquisition of many of its prized possessions that involved colonial expeditions, theft from archaeological digs, and even outright looting. As these historical provenances have begun to garner more spotlight in the realm of cultural diplomacy, the cries for establishing legal repatriation frameworks have only become more amplified. 

Despite justified and culturally appropriate calls for repatriation, the British Museum remains legally unable to repatriate any of the items in its collections, despite the increasingly progressive and culturally-aware curatorship. The main culprit for this barrier is, the British Museum Act of 1963, which "forbids the return of any object unless it is duplicated, damaged and no longer of public interest,” therefore “despite pressing demands for the Museum to repatriate cultural property, the Board of Trustees is prohibited from repatriation.” Two decades later, Parliament congruently passed the National Heritage Act of 1983 which similarly restricted board trustees of the Victoria & Albert Museum and other institutions from engaging in legal restitution.

While this decades-old legal precedent might seem bleak, Parliament's noticeable strides in opening up the proverbial gates to wide-scale repatriation talks must also be acknowledged. In fact, as of January of 2024, Parliament “announced changes to laws it planned to introduce this year that would grant national museums in England and Wales more power to repatriate cultural objects within their collections.” 

The law of focus is the Charities Act which has empowered national museums and galleries to “dispose of objects where there is a compelling moral obligation to do so.” It does need to be noted that many of these objects are frankly considered “lower-value” objects in comparison to the far more prized and intensely contested artifacts such as the Elgin Marbles.

The case study of the Elgin Marbles and the British Museum has been ground zero when it comes to repatriation and international cultural diplomacy. The Elgin Marbles are a relief, or frieze created to decorate the Parthenon at the Athenian Acropolis. Fast forward a thousand or so years, and Lord Elgin, a Scottish nobleman removed them from the Athenian Acropolis in 1801 and sold them to the British museum fifteen years later. The entire legal debate concerns a permit that Lord Elgin claimed to possess that Greece vehemently contests the validity and outright existence of. This dispute has been a major cultural impediment to Greek and British foreign relations.  

However when it comes to “higher-value” objects such as the abovementioned, recent amendments to the Charities Act have stipulated that legal international object transfers for restitution must be approved by the Charities Commission, effectively opening the floodgates to restitution while simultaneously adding extra levels of bureaucratic red-tape in the process. Proponents of these added bureaucratic measures, such as former charities minister Lord Kamall, “referenced the return of six Benin bronzes by the Horniman Museum,” stating that they “were handed over to the Nigerian government in November 2022 after receiving prior approval to do so by the Charities Commission,” showcasing the potential cultural promise of the Charities Act and its oversight commission.

Therefore, while the act is indeed an excellent start for legal restitution apparatuses in a system which has been extremely averse to the aforementioned, the law and Commission alike must be closely monitored over the coming years to ensure that timely and effective legal action is taken on object ownership debates. 

Aditya Lodha is a third-year student at Brown University who is currently pursuing a concentration in History with a focus in law and society. He is a staff writer for the Brown Undergraduate Law Review and can be contacted at: aditya_lodha@brown.edu!

Kourtney Beauvais is a sophomore at Brown University, concentrating in Applied Math-Economics and International and Public Affairs. She is an editor for the BULR and can be contacted at kourtney_beauvais@brown.edu.