The entry into force of the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage
On 2 January 2009 the Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage (CPUCH; Paris, 2001) entered into force for the first 20 States that decided to become parties to it. The CPUCH can be seen as a reasonable defence against the disastrous regime on underwater cultural heritage set forth by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS; Montego Bay, 1982). In fact, the UNCLOS allows for a “freedom-of-fishing” regime where a State which has a cultural link with the objects cannot prevent the pillage of its historical heritage. The picture is worsened by the reference in the UNCLOS to “the law of salvage and other rules of admiralty” which have been intended by United States courts as meaning the application of a first-come-first-served approach in many cases relating to the underwater cultural heritage. The basic defensive tools included in the CPUCH are the elimination of the undesirable effects of the law of salvage and finds, the exclusion of a first-come-first-served approach for the heritage found on the continental shelf, and the strengthening of regional cooperation.
Protection Versus PublicAccess: Two Concepts Compared within the Italian Underwater Cultural Heritage Management System
The concepts of protection and publicaccess relating to underwater cultural heritage are often taken as two contrasting notions in the Italian underwater cultural heritage management panorama. This contribution aims to review these concepts with the objective of emphasizing the possibility of sound and scientifically compelling public access to the underwater cultural heritage, keeping protection principles intact. With the support of in-the-field examples successfully produced worldwide, this paper will attempt to underline how scientifically sound public access activities in the field of underwater cultural heritage management can benefit the protection of such heritage.
Normative Hierarchy in International Law
Systems of law usually establish a hierarchy of norms based on the particular source from which the norms derive. In national legal systems, it is commonplace for the fundamental values of society to be given constitutional status and afforded precedence in the event of a conflict with norms enacted by legislation or adopted by administrative regulation; administrative rules themselves must conform to legislative mandates, while written law usually takes precedence over unwritten law and legal norms prevail over nonlegal (political or moral) rules. Norms of equal status must be balanced and reconciled to the extent possible. The mode of legal reasoning applied in practice is thus naturally hierarchical, establishing relationships and order between normative statements and levels of authority.