Dear John, Professor Torre and Members of ICOM,
As a new board member of ICME, I would like to commend John and INTERCOM
for putting together a truly fascinating session in Seoul, featuring
Professor Phelan's admirable clear proposal to ICOM about considering an
international court of arbitration for the resolution of cultural
property disputes. I strongly support Professor Torre's suggestion that
in exploring Phelan's proposal, we take inventory of all the mechanisms
that are already in place (including Article 8 (2) of the UNIDROIT
Convention of 1995, which actually sets fourth an arbitration
provision). While we eagerly await the posting of Phelan's paper, as
well as the extremely well argued and rich responses from Harrie Leyten
and Rich West, I would in line with Torre's suggestion, like to draw
your attention to another inventory idea.

As you know John, I have suggested turning the scattered institutional
information about already resolved cultural property cases into a
useable knowledge platform, simply by way of systematizing the data in
the format of a database. Such a resource could assist any particular
museum in the assessment of specific claims, keep track of best
practice, and ultimately promote the setting of standards in this field.
With regard to a possible arbitration institution of the kind Phelan is
proposing, a database would enable an arbitration panel to retrieve
similar cases and thus tailor and facilitate the adjudication and
ultimately help the parties to identify the best and most appropriate
resolution. The database could of course also exist independently of
such an arbitration institution, side by side with ICOM's 'Red List',
'100 missing objects', as well as the many commercial databases listing
stolen cultural property.

For those of you interested, I have sketched my database idea in some
detail in the last issue of ICME News (please go to:
http://museumsnett.no/icme/icmenews38.html#skrydstrup ). At the ICME
session in Seoul, I gave a paper contextualizing this database project
within the history of cultural property.  Please refer to the ICME
website: http://icme.icom.museum <http://icme.icom.museum/>  where the
interesting ICME papers from Seoul will be posted soon.

In any case, as a new ICME board member charged with the responsibility
to report and work on cultural property issues, I would be happy to
participate in any work being done in this arena.

Yours sincerely,
Martin
__________________________
Martin Skrydstrup
Doctoral Candidate
Department of Anthropology
Columbia University
452 Schermerhorn Extension
1200 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027
U.S.A.
Phone: +1 212 368 8480
Fax: +1 212 854 7347


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