ABSTRACT
Since the end of World War 2, international cultural heritage protection law and its domestic legal components have proceeded in their development in tandem with the development of international human rights laws and norms. Mindful of the very wide landscape of a debate around the relationship between crime, cultural heritage, and human rights, this chapter focuses on the area of overlap between human rights thinking and the looting and trafficking of ancient cultural objects from archaeological contexts. The original ‘cultural internationalist’ conception essentially rested on a constructed dichotomy between the global public and retentionist states considered to propagate a dangerous form of nationalism by restricting the movement of cultural heritage. Many in the dealing and collecting community do not agree that there is much complexity to it, and argue straightforwardly and often forthrightly both for their right to acquire and against repatriation.
