Beyond “Due Diligence”: Closing Loopholes in the Global Antiquities Trade

By Sarah Boxer

The global antiquities trade runs on paperwork. Export licenses, ownership histories, and dealer assurances are meant to guarantee legitimacy. Yet the Giacomo Medici and Gianfranco Becchina archives revealed what this paperwork often conceals: thousands of looted antiquities, photographed with soil still clinging to them, then funneled through traffickers, intermediaries, and donors into the collections of the world’s most prestigious museums. ^[1] Important individual and institutional collectors, like the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the “Met”) and the Getty, acquired these objects on the strength of falsified records that provided a veneer of compliance while masking criminal origins.^[2]

The disclosures prompted high-profile restitutions and several criminal convictions, most notably that of Medici himself.^[3] Yet their broader impact was reputational rather than structural. Objects tied to Medici and Becchina’s looting networks continue to circulate in the art market and appear in museums, demonstrating the persistence of loopholes in acquisition practices.^[4] Existing compliance frameworks have often proved inadequate to deter further abuses.^[5]

The 1970 United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (“UNESCO”) Convention was intended to establish safeguards by obligating States Parties, and through them museums and cultural institutions, to ensure that antiquities were not stolen, looted, or unlawfully exported.^[6] In practice, however, enforcement remains uneven and the antiquities trade continues to be largely self-regulated.^[7] Furthermore, leading museums have historically acted in response to scandal or prosecutorial intervention rather than treating provenance verification as an ongoing compliance obligation.^[8]