“This game of arm wrestling will not be the last, we will continue the fight until the complete recovery, with the help of God, of all our looted antiquities”… At the Egyptian Embassy, ??this Monday, June 12 in the morning, the fiery speech of the Attorney General of the Arab Republic of Egypt, Hamada El Sawy, vibrated like a warning: something has hardened in the way Egypt intends to recover its looted heritage, as in the how Western investigators are now scrambling to dismantle the sprawling networks of traffickers.
The two very beautiful blocks of golden stone, covered with hieroglyphs, which are now returned to Egypt, come from the tomb of the priest Haou, discovered in 2000 on the site of Tabbet el-Guech by the archaeologist Vassil Drobev. However, ten years after this discovery, these stones were offered by the dealer Didier Wormser, in Paris, in the Pierre Bergé et Associés auction house – which also appears in the case of the looted antiquities exhibited at the Louvre Abu Dhabi.
Presented as allegedly purchased in 1974 and 1975, one of these stones was then acquired, via an intermediary, by the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, and the other was purchased by a businessman. But thanks to the report by Vassili Dobrev, solicited out of caution by the Hungarian museum, and thanks above all to the decidedly formidable work, in France, of the investigators of the OCBC – Central Office for the Fight against Trafficking in Cultural Property –, the truth finally comes to light. burst: these two blocks were looted between 2001 and 2002 and illegally taken out of the territory of Egypt.
Restitutions of this type have of course already taken place. But this one is historic, because it introduces in France a case law which should discourage many buyers who are not very attentive… “In French law, according to article 2276 of our Civil Code, “in fact of furniture, possession is worth “”, the possessor in good faith of a stolen object cannot be ordered to return this object”, explains Maître Boissavy, lawyer for the Republic of Egypt. In theory, the businessman who acquired, without knowing that it had been looted, one of these two antique pieces, should therefore not be forced to return it. But for the first time, in the judgment that was rendered on October 18, the court gave priority to the Egyptian law of 1983 – establishing the inalienability and imprescriptibility of national Egyptian cultural property – over our French Civil Code. This is why, admittedly compensated by the condemned merchant, the buyer is now surprisingly seeing his property taken back. “This case law already existed in England and the United States, but in France, it is a real turning point in the fight against antiquities trafficking”, welcomes Maître Boissavy.
Recovered by the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, it is likely that they will eventually integrate the future GEM (Grand Egyptian Museum) which should devote an entire room to all the antiquities looted and then returned to Egypt: way for the Republic of Egypt to show the world all the standoffs that, in recent years, she has won…