GHA Priority IA: Protect our treasures from grasping foreign authoritarians.

Priority I
I. Restore balance in U.S. government policy in favor of fostering appreciation of ancient and indigenous cultures and the preservation of archaeological and ethnographic artifacts for the education and enjoyment of the American public.
A. Protect our treasures from grasping foreign authoritarians.
Contest efforts to make it easier for the government to seize and forfeit art and antiquities deemed cultural property long in U.S. collections based on obscure foreign laws. Archaeological advocacy groups with ties to foreign authoritarian governments lobbied for the introduction of last term’s proposed Terrorism Art and Antiquity Revenue Prevention Act (“TAAR”) as an anti-terrorist financing measure. That bill would have dramatically lowered the bar for criminal prosecutions based on other nations’ cultural patrimony laws. TAAR empowered federal prosecutors to charge individuals for possession of any object valued over $50 illegally removed from another country. As proposed, the bill would have turned millions of collectors, thousands of small businesses that trade in art and antiquities, and hundreds of museums into criminals overnight. TAAR died at the end of the last Congressional session, but is expected to be reintroduced in some form this term. We oppose criminal liability being predicated on obscure foreign laws, particularly those of authoritarian and dictatorial regimes. To the extent such laws should be honored here at all, any liability should only be prospective and based on foreign laws accessible on public web sites that vest clear title in a foreign country and which are consistently enforced at home.