How Illicit Trade in Art and Artefacts is Robbing us Blind

Dennis Cosgrove, who heads the OSCE Secretariat’s Border Security and Management Unit in the OSCE’s Transnational Threats Department, explains why trafficking in cultural property is a security threat that the OSCE can and should do more to address:   

What is the link between cultural property theft and security?

At first glance cultural property theft appears to be very much a boutique area for art dealers and people interested in paintings and cultural heritage. How it relates to security or organized crime is not immediately apparent – or rather, it wasn’t until the looting activities of terrorist organizations like Daesh became known.

My first encounter with this was many years ago when as an FBI Special Agent I was working on a case of theft and smuggling from Russia to the United States. There were diamonds and gold involved, which everyone understands have value, and in addition there were pieces of art. It was my first encounter with this area as an investigator. I became aware of the value that art and artefacts have for criminals, and that trying to recover and return them to the rightful owners is not an easy task.

When I joined the FBI Art Crime Team and worked further cases, I also learned that convincing others of the importance of fighting the illicit art trade is not easy. Part of the problem is that there is also perfectly legitimate art trade. There is no legitimate trade in heroin, for example. So you have this blend of legitimate and illicit trade, and that can get very tricky.

Essentially, what has happened in the art world is that the value of artwork and antiquities has skyrocketed; in comparison with the 1990s, prices have gone through the roof. That is what makes this area so enticing, not only for honest investors but for criminals as well. A stolen piece of art can be used as a money laundering vehicle, traded for weapons or drugs – or used to finance terrorism.  

Not only has the illegal trade in cultural goods exploded, it is sometimes linked to the illegal arms trade, the trafficking of human beings and migrant smuggling. Organized crime is becoming increasingly engaged in this type of trafficking. In financial terms, while it is difficult to get an estimate, most studies rank illicit trafficking in cultural property closely behind that in weapons and drugs.

How can the problem be tackled?

A lot needs to be done to increase the knowledge of people, especially border and customs officials. This became clear to me when we conducted our first week-long OSCE workshop on combating illicit trade in cultural property in Dushanbe in July, for participants from the different agencies in Tajikistan that deal with cross-border criminality. They learned from experts of INTERPOL, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, UNESCO, the Afghan Customs Service and the United States Department of Homeland Security. Each of these agencies brought something else to the table.  

We had Konstantinos-Orfeas Sotiriou, for example, an investigator with the Greek National Police and passionate archaeologist, accompanying us to museums and sites and explaining: “these are the things you need to look for when you are conducting a search.” For some of the participants it was quite an awakening. Without the training they may not have caught even the most obvious illegal shipment of antiquities. I think in the future they will have quite a different reaction when they come across a box of broken pottery that looks old.  

What are international agencies doing to combat cultural heritage crime?

There are well-established agreements on the protection of cultural property and prohibition of its illicit trade, such as the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict and its two Protocols. Recently, there are attempts to criminalize cultural heritage destruction. The International Criminal Court in The Hague will pronounce a sentence in September on the first case in which a defendant (Mr Al Mahdi) admitted guilt to the destruction of historical and religious monuments (in Timbuktu, Mali) as a war crime.

The Council of Europe is preparing a new criminal law convention to combat the illicit trafficking of cultural property.  The OSCE is participating in the process and we have provided input for specific areas.

The museums and academic community play an important role in combating this illicit trade.  The International Council of Museums has a number of helpful tools and useful data bases to assist investigators as does the World Customs Organization. This past April in Vienna the International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East issued a statement warning that cultural heritage in the Near East and North Africa is in great danger and calling for intense international co-operation at all levels.

There are gaps in the international efforts, however, that need to be filled. The UNESCO conventions, for example, are mostly focused on thefts from museums. The same is true of initiatives by the European Union and the World Customs Organization. There is a lot the OSCE can do in close partnership with the other organizations and agencies that I have already mentioned. The OSCE Parliamentary Assembly passed a resolution on protection of cultural property at its 2014 meeting in Baku.

What role could the OSCE play?

First and foremost, we have our expertise in border management, which is central to combating trafficking in cultural goods. We have our border focal points network, our field offices; we can connect people from different agencies in a cross-border, regional context. To me it’s a natural fit.

Fighting cultural property crime is closely linked to our other work on transnational threats. You can’t look at it separately from combating trafficking in drugs and weapons: we know that the same groups are engaged, because it’s so profitable.

In the OSCE we have an unusual mixture of source, transit and destination countries. The only way to address cultural property trafficking is to bring together representatives from different countries. At the workshop in Dushanbe we had Afghans and Tajiks: not many organizations can do that. Engaging Afghanistan is very important because it has such a serious problem with smuggling of artefacts. 

Keeping up with the evolving nature of the illicit artefact trade is an important challenge, which the OSCE is equipped to fulfil. It’s not enough to have just training; you have to stay fresh in terms of what is going on: the routes, the people involved, the sellers, the end users – this is changing all the time. But it’s no different from trafficking in weapons or drugs or human beings. At the OSCE, we have expertise, networks and forums in all of these fields. We have the POLIS forum for strategic police matters, for example, where we can update one another on the latest trends, trafficking routes and modes of operation.

Another area where the OSCE has experience is working with communities. Local people often know exactly where heritage sites are and what is going on there; they have to be encouraged to step up and protect them.  

In terms of expertise, we are very lucky that our OSCE participating States – Greece, Turkey, Italy – have some of the world’s best experts. Italy has arguably the best unit for investigating cultural trafficking in the world. We are not short on experts. We hope to organize a regional workshop for Central Asia and one in the Western Balkans region that will involve Bulgaria, Romania and Turkey. Also, we are looking to future engagement with the OSCE Partners for Co-operation in the Mediterranean region.

While stopping the illicit trafficking of cultural property may never become a priority area for the OSCE, it definitely deserves to be included in our work to combat transnational threats. As Orfeas put it during our workshop in Dushanbe, if you stop an illegal shipment of items that will be sold to a terrorist organization, you may have contributed to preventing a terrorist act.