Committee: The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime

Topic: Criminalizing the illicit trade in cultural property

Country: Syria

“A nation stays alive when its culture stays alive.”

Since the commencement of mankind, cultural property has borne the testimony of our
civilization's vicissitudes as well as signifying a connectivity and sense of community. It
symbolizes our history and our identity, our bond to the past, to our present and the future. In the
context of today’s globalisation, cultural heritage empowers us to recall our cultural diversity,
foster respect for one another, and rekindle intercultural communication. Besides, culture is
universally perceived as the main foundation of every country and every society. However,
culture is not something that we can create in a day, week or month. The development of culture
in a society is a long process. Understanding our cultural heritage can render our sense of our
personal identity more profound and proactively facilitate better cooperation in our community.
By integrating the past, the present, and the next generation, it takes centre stage in our society
and functions as the foundational cornerstone for establishing a powerful national identity.
Despite the paramountcy of cultural assets in terms of spirituality; identity and the welfare of a
country, cultural property are currently being ravaged by a wide range of illegitimate practices,
chiefly illicit trafficking that merits the most attention across the globe. Addled by the lucrative
profits, numerous perpetrators and facilitators of illicit trade and their potential victims neglect
the law and human decency to trigger irreversible repercussions on antiquated assets. Moreover,
illegitimate trafficking can be linked to other criminal activities, namely tax offences; money
laundering; falsification or the tampering with documents in order to deceive and induce customs
agents or other officials to believe that cultural property has a licit provenance and that can be
legitimately be exported. To illustrate this assertion, the self-proclaimed Islamic State of Iraq and
al-Sham (ISIS) recently shocked the world by decimating a number of archaeological sites
throughout the region under its control, among which were the ancient Assyrian cities of
Nineveh and Nimrud.

For decades, Syria was universally acknowledged as the hotbed of this particular intractable
practice. In a conflict-ridden state like Syria, illicit trafficking has been aggravated by incessant
instability and the laxly implemented law. The March 2011 onset of civil unrest and later
cumulated in conflict in Syria was accompanied by an upsurge of reporting in conventional and
social media of damage being inflicted upon cultural heritage. Archaeological sites, museums,
historical monuments and religious buildings were being ravaged intentionally and
unintentionally by commercially-inspired theft and looting, and unauthorized construction
works. Looted human patrimony was reported passing out of Syria into Lebanon , Jordan and
Turkey. The damage caused to cultural property in Syria is reflective of the way in which the
war has been fought. A large number of heritage sites and museums have had their infrastructure
damaged as a result of being caught in the middle of hostilities, such as the Ancient Cities of
Bosra and Aleppo. Syrian cultural property is preserved under a legal framework made up of
IHL, international treaties on transnational law enforcement, human rights law, and binding UN
Security Council resolutions. Irrefutably, international cooperation and coordination are integral
aspects in intervening in trafficking of cultural property. For so long, a multitude of international
and regional legal implementations have been put into operation, the most outstanding are the
1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict,
the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import,
Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The 1970 Convention was the
culmination of a long process of reflection on the fight against the illicit traffic of cultural
property. The UNSC (United Nations Security Council) had also stipulated 4 council resolutions:
UN Security Council Resolution 1483 (2003), UN Security Council Resolution 2199 (2015), UN
Security Council Resolution 2253 (2015), UN Security Council Resolution 2347 (2017). The
growing magnitude of illicit trafficking of cultural property, not restricted but greatly
exacerbated by crisis situations in countries like Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and
Mali, requires a swift criminal response. In order to ensure a harmonized application of
criminal preventive measures and justice responses, UNODC was stipulated with the creation
of a set of principles. The International Guidelines, which were implemented in 2014 by the UN
General Assembly are the outcomes of these legislative efforts.

The above proposals for action focus on both prevention and criminalization and aim at:
regulating and controlling the supply and demand sides of the art market; pursuing and punishing
thieves, looters, traffickers, as well as sellers and buyers, be they complicit or negligent;
investigating and punishing corruption, fraud and money-laundering; and ensuring the seizure of
wrongfully removed objects – and ultimately their restitution. However, the policy of protection
and recovery as adopted through exisgency actions failed to secure the cultural heritage of Syria
before or during the armed conflict that broke out in March 2011. For the same reasons, there are
no grounds for believing that the policy will be any more successful in the future, either in Syria,
in neighboring countries, or indeed anywhere else in the world. The illegal trade in cultural
objects is a persistent global problem, and any response aimed at controlling the trade needs to
be conceived and implemented globally and applied resolutely.
 As the variety and scope of illicit trade today and its repercussions globally implies, this
intractible issue is not something that can be left merely to the law implementation section,
although it has a key role to play. In order to effectively ameliorating the situation, fostering
mainstream awareness of the severe ramification of this crime will appreciably contributed to the
reduction of aforementioned turpitude. An overhaul in ideology pertaining to preserving human
patrimony that a country wish to inculcate in citizens will render them recoil from perpetrating
those foregoing practices.

Nonetheless, Syria , with the goal to dispelling any hurdles and reservations as well as
ensuring a far-reaching step towards global completeness, is privileged to fully collaborate with
the comittee pertaining to implementing effective and feasible solutions. To be more specific,
Syria hopes for assistance in any possible measures from the international nations. Hopefully,
this amiable cooperation will ensue harmony among nations, rid each other’s riddles, paving
clear paths for advancement.

Sources:
1. file:///C:/Users/HH/Downloads/Brodie+2015+Syria+green.pdf
2.
file:///C:/Users/HH/Downloads/Checci%20Paper%20for%20Act%20for%20Heritage%20Conference
%20Nicosia%20Oct%202019-%20FINAL_%20ihp%20_web%204.10++.docx.pdf
3.