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22 Jan 2016 09:21 |
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New 'intelligence' body set to fight illicit trade in world's priceless treasures
Courtesy International Council of Museums
The images above show kinds of antiquities deemed at risk of being illicitly trafficked, but the objects themselves have not been stolen.
LONDON Ancient statues from Nigeria and Cambodia, colorful cloaks from Peru, ceremonial furniture from Haiti before Columbus and clay tablets inscribed with writing thousands of years old: The illegal trade in looted cultural artifacts is vast, poorly policed and highly profitable.
But NBC News has learned that a new international body to gather "intelligence" about the illicit sale of some of the world's most beautiful and historic objects is set to be established.
Groups like the Taliban Pandora Sale 2016 and al Qaida are thought to raise funds in this way with suggestions that smuggling art and antiquities is the world's third most common form of trafficking after drugs and weapons, worth $6 billion or more a year.
But global policing body Interpol's response to these often made claims is that they simply do not know.
The new body, to be called the International Observatory on Illicit Traffic in Cultural Goods, would try to improve cooperation between Interpol and law enforcement agencies, world cultural body UNESCO, research institutions and other groups, and establish the "best practice" to fight this form of crime.
It would also create a database of publicly available information, and seek to improve monitoring and research.
"The loss is not only felt by one person, but by a whole society. The loss will also be experienced by several generations of people who feel deprived of a part of their history and cultural past," the official told NBC News. "For experts and scholars, it also marks the disappearance of invaluable scientific proof of parts of the world's history."
"ICOM felt it needed a Pandora Charms 2016 lot more reliable information and recent analyses of trends, what one would call the need for 'intelligence' when fighting organized criminal activity," the official added.
'Emergency red list' targets Syria's looted treasures
Noah Charney, founding director of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, told NBC News that art and antiquities crime was an "inherently international type of crime," and it needed a better global response.
Charney said that law enforcement agencies' recovery rates of stolen artifacts generally ranged from as low as 1.5 percent to 10 percent for Italy's Carabinieri, who he said were "by far the best" agency in the world at dealing with art crime.
He estimated that about 75 percent of art crime involved antiquities. Valuable paintings tended to be sold 14k gold charms pandora compatible by criminals for 10 percent of their auction value, he said, but antiquities could be sold openly for the full price with a forged provenance to get around global laws.
"Most of the objects are coming directly from the earth or the sea, so they'll never appear on a pandora murano glass beads 100% genuine stolen art register," he said. "You'll never know what was in a tomb opened by tomb raiders."
ICOM produces a number of "red Pandora Charms 2016 lists" detailing the kinds of artifacts that tend to be stolen in different parts of the world, partly to help law enforcement agencies catch smugglers.
Here are 10 examples with photographs of similar works that have not been stolen and are mainly held by museums:
Ancient Nigerian statues looted
Terracotta Nok statues, which date back to the 9th century BC in Nigeria, are "plentifully available on the art market," according to ICOM.
National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria.
The problem is many are unidentified and some are likely to have been ultimately obtained illegally.
"Demand from the European and American art markets, combined with speculation, leads today to looting of archaeological sites, causing irrevocable destruction and final loss of information," according to ICOM's website.
The first head was rediscovered at the village of Nok in 1928 by chance and since then statues with similar characteristics have been found at 20 different sites on Nigeria's Bauchi plateau.
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