Ancient Roman coins looted from archaeological sites in Spain. A 3,500 year-old sculpture of a pharaoh stolen from Egypt during the Arab Spring. The destruction of the ancient ruins of Palmyra by the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL/Da’esh).
These are all recent examples of trafficking in cultural property. Below, find out more about this crime and why it matters.
Trafficking in cultural property is an illicit trade that results in the loss, destruction, removal or theft of irreplaceable items. These can include art, antiquities, fossils, archaeological cultural property and heritage. Sites within conflict or natural disaster zones are particularly at risk.
Trafficking in cultural property is not a victimless crime. It deprives people of access to shared heritage and culture – eroding identities, erasing the past and undermining our future.
It weakens economies by robbing countries of current and potential sources of tourism revenue. It can jeopardize peace and security by financing terrorism – ISIL, for instance, sold Syrian and Iraqi cultural property to fund attacks.
As noted by the brief by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), trafficking in cultural property follows transnational supply chains similar to those seen in other organized illicit trades. Items are predominantly trafficked out of archaeologically rich origin or source countries, through transit points, to buyers in destination countries.
Similar to trafficking of illicit drugs, wildlife, precious metals or timber as well as trafficking in human beings, the flow of cultural property generally moves from lower-income areas to wealthier markets.
The process typically begins with illicit excavation, looting, or theft of cultural property from archaeological sites, museums, archives, places of worship or private collections. These criminal acts are often facilitated by organized criminal groups that exploit weak border controls, insufficient documentation and provenance verification and corruption. Once removed from their country of origin, cultural property objects enter intermediary or laundering stages, and traffickers often seek to obscure the illicit origin and ownership history of stolen objects in order to monetize them in the international art market.
Detecting the trafficking of cultural property can be particularly difficult due to the structure of the market, which is characterized by confidentiality and the use of intermediaries.
Cultural property has also traded freely for centuries without requirements for due diligence checks about where such items came from (provenance), meaning many object histories were never recorded or have been lost over time.
The structure of this market means that criminals can fabricate provenance for illicit items and sell them in legal markets through auction houses or dealers.
The lack of a global database on trafficked cultural property, together with inconsistent national laws, also makes it difficult to evaluate the scale of the problem and coordinate responses.
UNODC supports Member States in implementing the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC), including efforts to prevent, investigate and prosecute the trafficking of cultural property and related offences.
UNODC also actively promotes the implementation of the 2014 UN International Guidelines for Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Responses with Respect to Trafficking in Cultural Property and Other Related Offences, which aim to strengthen criminalization, law enforcement cooperation, prosecution, restitution, and preventive measures. It provides legal and technical assistance, capacity building and support for inter-agency coordination among Member States.
UNODC delivers operational capacity-building to criminal justice and cultural authorities. This includes training on Open-Source Intelligence (OSINT) for online market monitoring, Systems Analysis and Disruption Planning (SA/DP) to map and dismantle criminal networks, and Document Fraud Detection to identify falsified provenance and export certificates.
In addition, UNODC facilitates cooperation between prosecutors and judicial authorities to build capacities of prosecutors and judges to handle cross-border evidence, mutual legal assistance, restitution procedures and asset recovery related to cultural property crime. These initiatives promote consistent application of the law, faster case referrals, and joint investigative actions.
Through regional expert meetings in West Africa and the Middle East and North Africa, UNODC brought together criminal justice, law enforcement, and cultural authorities to address the links between terrorism, organized crime, and trafficking in cultural property. The meetings, attended by authorities from Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, and across the MENA region, helped identify regional risks, analyze trafficking routes and conflict-driven vulnerabilities, and develop policy and operational recommendations to strengthen inter-agency coordination, investigations, prosecutions, and cross-border cooperation. Complementing these efforts, UNODC supports Member States in enhancing frontline detection and interdiction capacities through advanced risk profiling, inter-agency coordination, and capacity-building for customs and border control authorities to prevent the smuggling of cultural property and other illicit commodities.
