Law vs. Justice
On site & online
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| 5 EUR, red. 2,50 EUR |
| Book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the Foyer. |
| You can also follow the event digitally via Livestream. |
| Duration: 90 min |
| English, German |
| Accessible for wheelchairs |
| Ground Floor, Hall 2 |
| Part of: 99 Questions |
In the fourth dialogue of 99 Questions, the topic of restitution will be addressed from legal and transnational justice perspectives.
It will be explored how local communities are involved in restitution processes and how negotiations between different governments, museums and communities can take place. In particular, the dialogue will consider which legal instruments are relevant to restitutions. Who can define a violation of the law and which legal framework is taken into account? Which international legal instruments exist for restitution processes? How can a more equitable negotiation for restitution, the reclaiming of cultural heritage, and accountability for colonial injustices be achieved? And, do legal instruments contribute to a more just negotiation or do they simply reproduce a neo-colonial understanding of justice?
Moderation
Eliza Apperly
The panelists
currently holds a post-doc fellow at the Museums, Collections and Society group of Leiden University. In 2016, she joined the Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies of Leiden University in relation to her PhD project, and from 2002 till 2015 she was general secretary to the Dutch Restitutions Committee for Nazi looted. She is member of the Ethics Committee of the Dutch Museum Association, coordinator of the Heritage Under Threat group of the LDE Centre for Global Heritage and Development, and member of the Committee on Participation in Global Cultural Heritage Governance of the International Law Association. Between 2015 and 2020 she sat on the board of trustees of the German Lost Art Foundation. Evelien lectures regularly and published widely on the topic of restitution and looted art.
has a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Colombo where she is teaching as a Professor in the Department of Commercial Law. She has researched into the area of cultural property law, with her original research focusing on post-colonial and post-conflict perspectives, viewed from the lens of Sri Lanka. Currently, she is researching the validity of the international legal regime governing cultural property, with a special focus on colonial cultural property. Examined using ‘Third World Approaches to International Law’ (TWAIL) this line of critique attempts to unravel the reasons for which certain legal norms were codified and accepted as the law in this area. It also examines how these legal norms have impacted the rights of home states of colonial cultural property in the debate on the return of cultural property taken during times of colonial occupation.
holds a Ph.D. from Wits University, Anthropology Department/South Africa, with a thesis titled The Migrated Museum: Restitution or A Shared Heritage? She joined the Botswana National Museum in 1993, where she now holds the position of Chief Curator & Head of the Ethnology Division. She facilitates the documentation, registration, conservation, and preservation of Ethno-Historic Collections and related research and publication. Her professional and scholarly research interests have been geared towards the country’s migrated collections, participating in international debates and projects around the same colonial holdings as well as contemporary cases on the illicit trafficking of cultural property. She has also contributed articles and chapters to publications on heritage, and has been part of a number of local and international projects with museums and universities on heritage.
