News
Topical news to help promote and raise the public profile of cultural restitution
Articles with up to date facts, information and current research to ensure the debate is better informed
Campaigners for ending the public display and sale of human remains will be encouraged by this month’s news from the DCMS that it plans to review its Guidance for the Care of Human Remains in Museums
After assuming the UK’s highest office, another British prime minister has changed his mind about returning the Parthenon Marbles to Greece. Was this predictable?
The USA is being urged not to renew a five-year cultural property agreement with the Arab Republic of Egypt, on the grounds Egypt has prioritised ‘prestige megaprojects’ and ‘political spectacle’ over site protection and collections management
“Modern morality,” wrote Oscar Wilde, “consists in accepting the standard of one’s age.” But how can museums define the moral standard of this age when constrained by historic rules of stewardship and the absence of a modern ethical framework?
This week’s announcement that Cambridge University has transferred legal ownership of its collection of 116 Benin artefacts to Nigeria could be hugely significant
Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport has confirmed it will review the exclusion it imposed on national collections that prevents them from returning cultural objects on moral grounds
Six Native American skulls, acquired to advance the pseudoscience of phrenology, have been returned by the University of Edinburgh to the Muscogee Nation, a self-governed Native American Tribal Nation
Can museum visitors throw light on objects that lack a reliable history, description or provenance? Manchester Museum hopes they can
A rare and important 19th century gold hairpin once owned by Empress Tiruwork, wife of the Abyssinian Emperor Tewodros II, will be returning to Ethiopia following negotiations by the Royal Ethiopian Trust with the Rome auction house Bertolami Fine Art
In 2022 several western collections made a decision to transfer ownership of their Benin Bronzes to Nigeria. Reassured by progress on the construction of a major new facility in Benin City, they understood their artefacts would be exhibited in a new museum to be called the Edo Museum of West African Art