Indigenous peoples’ emphasis on protecting their cultural heritage (including land) through a human rights-based approach reveals the synergies and conflicts between the World Heritage Convention and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). This article focuses on how their insistence on the right to participate effectively in decision-making and centrality of free, prior, and informed consent as defined in the UNDRIP exposes the limitations of existing United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization and World Heritage Convention processes effecting Indigenous peoples, cultures, and territories and how these shortcomings can be addressed. By tracking the evolution of the UNDRIP and the World Heritage Convention from their drafting and adoption to their implementation, it examines how the realization of Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination concerning cultural heritage is challenging international law to become more internally consistent in its interpretation and application and international organizations to operate in accordance with their constitutive instruments.

It has been more than 20 years since the raids on the premises at the Geneva Freeport were linked to Giacomo Medici. The seizure of photographic records led to a major investigation of acquisitions by museums and private collectors. This was expanded following the confiscation of archives from Robin Symes and Gianfranco Becchina. Over 350 items have been returned to Italy from North American public and private collections as well as auction houses and galleries. This article reviews the returns and identifies some of the major themes. It also notes some of the unresolved cases both in North America and in Europe and Japan.

In light of the recent rise of destruction and looting of cultural property, a need for formalized heritage protection has arisen. Increasingly popular in the debate has become the instrument of international assistance known as “safe havens.” These temporary refuges for at-risk cultural goods in a third country have recently been implemented by Switzerland, France, the United States, and the Association of Art Museum Directors. We assess the contributions and shortcomings of these four regimes using a comparative approach. Mainly, we find that, despite variations in their scope and structure, none of the models accounts entirely for today’s major difficulties in protecting endangered cultural properties. We draw recommendations for future safe haven states against the backdrop of the existing models and hope to see the instrument used in practice as a way to safely isolate cultural property from destructive conflicts.

This article will show how institutions and cultural values mediate changes in the governance of repatriation policy. By examining ownership paradigms and institutional power structures and analyzing the changing discourses before and after the passage of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, it is possible to understand the ramifications of formalizing repatriation. The current binary of cultural property nationalism/cultural property internationalism in relation to Indigenous ownership claims does not represent the full scope of the conflict for Indigenous people within the Western legal interpretations of property ownership. Inclusion of a cultural property indigenism component into the established cultural property nationalism/internationalism ownership paradigm will more accurately represent Indigenous concerns for cultural property. Looking at the rules, norms, and strategies of national and international laws and museum institutions, this article will argue that there are consequences to repatriation claims that go beyond the possession of property and that a formalized process (or semi-formalized approach) can aid in addressing Indigenous rights.

China’s broad geopolitical strategy and positioning for global influence includes its averred legal position in relation to its sovereignty and jurisdiction in the South China Sea. A response to this legal position was the Philippines’ initiation of arbitral proceedings constituted under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. Despite the non-participation of China in these proceedings, the arbitral decision of 2016 clarified a number of legal provisions pertinent to the ongoing territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea. This decision impacted directly on China’s assertion of sovereign and jurisdictional historical title or rights, which, in part, relies on evidence obtained from underwater cultural heritage and the associated maritime archaeology. This article critically evaluates China’s maritime archaeology program and its policy with respect to underwater cultural heritage in light of the 2016 arbitral decision and the underlying international law of the sea. While recognizing that China’s policy is not inconsistent with its broader heritage policy, and its national approach to the protection of underwater cultural heritage, this article argues that this cannot be used to support China’s South China Sea claims and is not only misplaced, such as to pose a risk to the archaeological record, but also inconstant with international developments in the form of the 2001 United Nations Convention of the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage.