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Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Bill

My Lords, I very much welcome this Bill and congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Janner, on bringing it forward. I declare an interest as a member of the Spoliation Advisory Panel, since it was first set up by the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, under the extremely able chairmanship of Sir David Hirst, to whom I pay warm tribute. He has worked extraordinarily hard with the other members of the panel, but the burden of the work has largely fallen on him. The terms of reference of the panel are as narrow as the terms of reference of the Bill. The concern of the panel has been extremely limited; it has been to recommend a fair solution to cases in which cultural objects were looted, stolen or disposed of by forced sale in the Nazi era—that is, between the beginning of 1933 and the end of 1945. The panel has examined nine cases that have been referred to it voluntarily since it was set up. In three of these, the preferred solution would have been restoration of the objects to their rightful owners, but in two cases out of the three this was not possible because of the law against deacquisitioning that governed the national museums of England and Scotland. The law does not cover any museums in Wales or Northern Ireland. In 2000, the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport recommended that legislative barriers that prevented morally proper restoration should be removed. In the same year, the advisory panel recommended that permissive legislation should be introduced. The panel’s recommendation in 2000 followed a particularly tricky and fascinating case, in which not an individual but a library was claiming restoration of a rare Beneventan missal, apparently looted after the destruction of Monte Cassino, sold to Sotheby’s by a returning British officer, now deceased, bought by the British Museum from Sotheby’s and then in due course passed on to the British Library, where it now is. The missal was extremely valuable as a beautiful example of a kind of local script that gave, along with the words of the Mass, a kind of indication of how these words should be sung. It was a kind of early attempt at written musical notation. The view of the panel was that this priceless object belonged in the place where scholars were most likely to benefit from and enjoy it. There are other examples in the same area of Italy of this kind of script, although not exactly the same. The case did not seem to fall exactly under the terms of reference, because there is no particular evidence that the missal was looted by the Nazis, nor was it a Jewish family who was claiming restoration. Nevertheless, it fell squarely within the time of our remit, and the looting would not have happened if it had not been for the war. Unfortunately, the present Bill, if it becomes law, will not be retrospective, but the principle that informs the Bill is absolutely right, as exemplified in this particular case. Finally, all the recommendations that the spoliation panel has made and all those that will be made by the new advisory panel are based on moral considerations. Legally, the statutory time for complaints of wrongful acquisition or failure to take proper account of provenance has long been passed, in all these cases. Our task on the panel was to ask whether, nevertheless, there were moral reasons for recommending restitution or compensation. There is no danger of a slippery slope argument being deployed here—and your Lordships will know that I am not a friend of that type of argument in any circumstances. Each case will be examined separately by the advisory panel and its advice passed on; each will be examined with extreme care on an individual basis, so there is no danger of any extension of this kind of order for deacquisition. This has happened in the past and will happen in the future; each case will be examined separately. Moreover, there is a sunset clause, which ensures that there will be re-examination of the case. Sadly, the number of cases is likely to fall—indeed, the number of cases coming before the panel has fallen and is now a trickle, because the families, sadly, die out. I recommend the Bill to the House as absolutely timely, if not belated, and an extremely good example of just and fair legislation.