UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects
UNIDROIT Convention on Stolen or Illegally Exported Cultural Objects (Rome, 1995) is the international treaty on the subject of cultural property protection. It attempts to strengthen the main weaknesses of the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. The UNIDROIT Convention seeks to fight the illicit trafficking of cultural property by modifying the buyer's behaviour, obliging him/her to check the legitimacy of their purchase. Due diligence and Burden of Proof The Convention states that if a cultural property was stolen it must be returned (Chapter II, Art. 3.1). Any possessor of a stolen cultural object required to return it might be compensated only if he/she can prove due diligence at the time of the purchase and that he/she neither knew nor ought reasonably to have known that the objects was stolen (Chapter II, Art. 4.1 ). To assess the legitimacy of the object's origin, art market players can use international and national databases dedicated to cultural property protection, for instance, the INTERPOL Stolen Works of Art Database collects information about stolen cultural property and issues identification numbers to cultural objects. Whereas Chapter II of the Convention