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Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Bill

My Lords, this is no ordinary Bill before your Lordships’ House. It is a short one but a complex one. Art is an ethical issue. Displaying looted art, once it is known to be such, is not just an invasion of privacy and a demonstration that wrongdoers may indeed profit from their crimes; it is also putting on show something that the owners never meant to be seen in such circumstances. It has ceased to be an object of beauty and one that museums can be proud of or use for educational and aesthetic aims. The spectator cannot look at it without seeing the pain and betrayal that led it to be situated there in a national museum. It taints the spectators who knowingly take advantage of the presence of the picture there and it speaks to them of loss and war, not creativity and insight. It is a well known principle in physics that the act of observation changes the object observed and there is something of that principle in our viewing of looted art. The Bill has an exemplary background of preparation. The UK set up the Spoliation Advisory Panel in 2000 consequent on the Washington principles of the 1998 conference on Holocaust assets, agreed by all the then EU states, and a total of 44 states in all. The panel provides mediation and takes moral issues into account, as stressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Warnock. Its existence recognises that the people who lost property in the Nazi era face many obstacles in proving legal ownership in the civil courts, though they may also choose that route. The museum directors set up a working group in 1998 to establish principles governing provenance and spoliation; the Select Committee on Culture, Media and Sport supported this approach in its seventh report and the advisory panel recommended this legislation. The Bill fills a gap because other museums already have a power to return or to offer compensation. The museum may, however, still refuse to carry out the recommendation of the panel and the Secretary of State. The Bill passed through the Commons swiftly. This is not the Elgin Marbles situation, because in the circumstances covered by the Bill there is a known victim of a strictly defined period. The victims were ideological targets of the destruction of a people along with their goods; indeed, the looting possibilities may have provided an extra inducement to carry on to mass extermination. This form of looting was recognised as early as 1943 by the Inter-Allied Declaration. The recent Terezin Declaration of the June Prague Holocaust-era assets conference called on nations to do exactly what is being done in the Bill, and the UK, which had a delegation to the conference, was praised for its initiative. I echo the sentiments of the noble Lord, Lord Freud, in his brilliant and moving maiden speech earlier today, and of the noble Lord, Lord Haskel, in expressing gratitude to this country for its movement towards the correct principles in this situation and for its tolerance and nurturing of those who came here in 1939 and earlier, deprived of all their worldly goods, and who had to rebuild their careers. The declaration of the June Prague conference together with the joint declaration by the European Commission at the same conference reminded nations that they should support intensified systematic provenance research in archives, make the results known on the internet and establish mechanisms to assist claimants. The Bill’s provisions are a model for what should happen in relation to real property looted during the Nazi era, all of which is situated in the European Union countries—not here, of course—where the conflict and the seizures took place. The Terezin Declaration likewise called on those countries that have not yet made restitution—the most egregious of them is Poland, and here I declare a possible interest—to do so along these lines, and Her Majesty’s Government by signature have aligned themselves with this. I commend the Bill to your Lordships and look for ultimate justice and peace of mind for those who lost their lives in the war and whose well chosen artefacts are the living and permanent reminder of their lost existence.