Author: Georgios Pavlidis, UNESCO Chair, Associate Professor of International and EU law, Director of the Jean Monnet Center of Excellence AI-2-TRACE-CRIME at NUP, Cyprus
Date: 31.05.2025
The fight against illicit trade of cultural property constitutes a battleground for legal innovation, international cooperation, and criminal accountability. This is particularly true in a world where artefacts can be looted faster than they can be catalogued. The Council of Europe’s 2017 Nicosia Convention on Offences Relating to Cultural Property (CETS No. 221) enters this battleground with an ambitious goal: to criminalise a wide array of conduct relating to the destruction, trafficking, and illicit trade of cultural heritage.
For members of the GLITSS COST Action, committed to tackling global threats through interdisciplinary, systemic approaches, this treaty is particularly relevant. It redefines cultural property crimes not as niche heritage issues, but as serious transnational offences that intersect with broader security concerns, including organised crime and terrorism financing.
A Shift from Soft Law to Criminal Law
The Convention is the first binding international instrument focused specifically on criminalising cultural property offences. It fills normative gaps left by instruments such as the 1970 UNESCO Convention and the 1995 UNIDROIT Convention, which primarily rely on civil and administrative enforcement. In contrast, the Nicosia Convention adopts a criminal law approach, targeting offences from illegal excavation and trafficking to the market placement of looted objects.
What distinguishes the Convention is its comprehensive scope: it outlines offences along the entire illicit supply chain, from looter to buyer. It also challenges the assumption that actors in the art market can remain neutral. For instance, it encourages States to adopt a “should have known” standard for market participants—meaning that dealers and auction houses could be held accountable not only when they knowingly trade in looted goods, but also when they fail to exercise due diligence.
Harmonisation Without Uniformity?
Despite its forward-looking stance, the Convention faces a recurring challenge in international law instruments: reconciling harmonisation with national sovereignty. It permits States to define “cultural property” under their own domestic laws and allows reservations on key offences such as illegal import or excavation. This flexibility may encourage ratifications. At the same time, it risks diluting the treaty’s effect. A State may, in effect, sign up without committing to criminalise all core offences—a loophole that undermines the aim of establishing consistent standards across borders.
This tension resonates with one of GLITSS’s core research concerns: how international instruments can be designed to accommodate legal diversity without sacrificing enforcement coherence. The Nicosia Convention is a case study in navigating the limits of optionality in treaty design.
Enforcement: The Missing Machinery
The Convention’s enforcement vision is bold but seems to be incomplete. It encourages (rather than mandates) the creation of specialised investigative units and refrains from imposing binding obligations to share intelligence or coordinate prosecutions. Its follow-up mechanism—the Committee of the Parties—can monitor and advise, but it lacks investigative or sanctioning powers. In practice, effective enforcement will depend on national political will, institutional capacity, and cross-border cooperation. Conversely, capacity gaps in law enforcement, weak prosecutorial incentives, and the opacity of the art market remain critical obstacles to implementation.
In Search for Global Alignment
Nicosia Convention does not exist in a vacuum. It must align with broader frameworks such as the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, while also coexisting with EU-level measures like Regulation (EU) 2019/880 on the import of cultural goods. Yet, unlike the EU’s mutual recognition instruments, the Council of Europe’s mechanisms rely more heavily on voluntary cooperation—raising questions about consistency in a globalised art market. Despite its weaknesses, the Nicosia Convention sends a powerful signal: cultural property crime is not a victimless offence, but a threat to historical memory, as well as to international security. Whether the Convention can live up to its promise depends not only on ratifications but also on enforcement muscle and market reform. As we study global illicit trade and the structures designed to combat it, the Nicosia Convention offers both inspiration and useful lessons on the long road from symbolism to systemic change.
