ABSTRACT
Values are important in cultural heritage because they reveal ideas, principles, and standards about what is significant, virtuous and desirable in a field that is genuinely about value production, invariably cultural, and often economic. In international heritage law, values perform the functions of qualifying the safeguarding of cultural objects, inevitably piercing through matters of national sovereignty, security, and humankind’s legacy when controlling the transnational movement of such artefacts. A key debate with respect to values in cultural heritage law is whether cultural heritage law has intrinsic value, or, rather, its values are derived externally. Heritage law traditionally assumes intrinsic value, whereas critical heritage studies have long rejected this notion, and understand cultural heritage’s values to flow from extrinsic sources. The effect of this dissonance is that heritage law articulates and relies upon values that are not made-to-measure for the heritage field, which can jeopardise the recovery of ill-gotten cultural objects and, ultimately, the safeguarding of cultural heritage. When it comes to economic crimes perpetrated with the use of cultural objects, the request for the return of tainted artefacts is founded on the extrinsic value of such property. I will argue that the law’s reliance on intrinsic value contradicts reality and creates a schism between heritage practice and heritage law which ultimately gets in the way of the safeguarding mission to which intrinsic value (and the law more broadly) purports to contribute. The same schism happens within the law, with heritage law’s reliance on intrinsic value being unmatched in other areas of law that are also used to safeguard heritage, particularly when heritage is used as part of complex crimes. Therefore, it is important that heritage scholars and practitioners be mindful of the pitfalls of the use of values in legal discourses surrounding heritage. I will use the illicit transboundary movement of cultural objects as a case study for the question of values in heritage law, to showcase how different bodies of law use extrinsic value, and therefore heritage law’s insistence on intrinsic value disconnects it not only from critical heritage studies and understanding heritage as an instrument of power, but also from other legal frameworks with greater enforcement potential. To support my argument within this case study, I will look at regulatory initiatives of transnational criminal law regarding cultural objects, such as international conventions and resolutions of the United Nations Security Council against profit-driven crimes with the use of cultural heritage.
