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 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Change ICOM-L subscription options, unsubscribe, and search the archives at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/icom-l.html