How rampant is the trafficking of cultural heritage? You're not alone if you're confused about the scale of this problem. 

However, a new report published by the World Customs Organisation provides hard data which appears to debunk the widely-held view that art and heritage trafficking has grown into a major transnational crime, perhaps even the third largest black market crime after drugs and the arms trade.

WCO does recognise the complexity of smuggling cultural artefacts and warns that trends and patterns in their analysis 'serve for indicative purposes only'. Its findings, they add, cannot ‘represent all the efforts of the law enforcement or the real volumes of illicit trade of cultural objects’. Nevertheless, the incidents they do record barely register on the scale of other risk categories the Organization monitors each year.

Leading our views on the scale of art trafficking are the numerous press reports and other research which suggesting it's grown into a huge industry, large enough to finance organised crime networks and terrorism.  Reports such as the one published in June 2020 by ATHAR, the Antiquities Trafficking and Heritage Anthropology Research Project is just one example.  ATHAR claim to have identified over 120 groups and nearly two million members using Facebook and other social media channels for online trafficking of looted artefacts. The pressure they applied led Facebook to remove all historical artefacts for sale or exchange from their platforms.

However, WCO’s Illicit Trade Report 2019, reveals a picture of only modest illicit activity, with cultural property accounting for just 0.2% of all the investigations and seizures carried out by WCO last year. 

*  Of the 102,214 cases they investigated globally, just 227 cases (0.22%) involved cultural heritage 

*  There were only 271 seizures of cultural items (0.20%) from a total of 133,453

*  Despite an increase in the number of countries that report on cultural heritage (23 to 34) there was        a fall in the number of cultural cases investigated (from 260 to 227) 

*  Customs officers identified and recovered 9,399 artefacts in 2019 - a 59.5% decline from the 22,462          artefacts recovered in 2018

*  As in 2018, a handful of cases contributed to the majority of items recovered.

The number of seizures relating to ancient artefacts (which appear in the category ‘archaeological excavations/discoveries’) remain surprisingly small, declining in number from around 250 to around 130. However, these figures won't include the spoils of widespread looting we know took place in Iraq and Syria over recent years and will likely be recorded in future editions of WCO's reporting.  It is coins, banknotes and medals that remain the largest category of all cultural items WCO seized last year (5,141 from a total of 9,399).

The report triumphs some of their successes, including seizures by Customs officers at Kabul Airport, the discovery of very rare pre-Columbian objects at Barajas Airport and the seizure of 2,500 ancient coins by the Argentinian Federal Police Force from an online sale.  WCO's successes in helping to identify faked antiquities entering the western market are also highlighted, including the hoard of faked Iraqi ‘cuneiform’ tablets, figurines and cylinder seals that were identified by a UK Border Force officer at Heathrow Airport in July 2019.

Apparently, about half of all successful cultural heritage cases (47.5%) were the result of routine control procedures.

WCO’s involvement with larger enforcement operations is also recorded.  In the autumn of 2019 their co-operation with INTERPOL and Europol on Operations Athena II and Pandora IV helped dismantle a number of large-scale international networks of art traffickers, leading to the recovery of more than 25,000 art and archaeological artefacts, as well as 101 arrests. 

The Russian Federation reported the greatest number of cases - their 133 reported cases represented over half (58.5%) the global total.  Other cases were mainly centred on Eastern and Central Europe, South America and the Caribbean, with Western Europe, apparently, no longer viewed as the centre for cultural heritage crime. 

But there are genuine problems with WCO’s reporting.  These mostly reflect the ‘complexity’ and politics of trafficking art and antiquities across borders. 

WCO recognises there's often a high degree of secrecy, as well as a reluctance to share information among enforcement agencies, particularly with ongoing cases. In some countries, for example, customs seizure data will be shared only after restitution has taken place to the source country. All this means it can take many years before cases are resolved and before reliable data can be analysed and published. 

Even after taking these factors into account, WCO’s report does suggest that trafficking of cultural heritage doesn’t come close to the scale of illicit trading in drugs, counterfeit goods, arms and other illegal cross-border activities. 

It also adds further weight to the findings of the US-based RAND Corporation’s report, which suggested last May that the size and structure of the market in trafficking cultural heritage is smaller than previously understood.  Drawing on publicly available information, the RAND report also concluded that art trafficking networks are neither as sophisticated nor as well-organised as many had thought.

But none of this suggests we can afford to relax our attention in the fight against art traffickers, or that the WCO analysis is correct in all respects. There’s still too much at stake; still too much anecdotal and hard evidence of recent looting and smuggling activities.  For one thing, it will take some further time before items stolen in the last few years emerge for sale in the open market, either online or in our salerooms.  For another, we should bear in mind not every smuggled or faked artefact always reaches the attention of Customs.

Photo: Fake cuneiform tablets in their wrapping

Courtesy of © Trustees of the British Museum 2020