7 - No Cultural Property Protection Without Leadership: The Organisation of Control in the 1954 Hague Convention

Summary

The Preamble to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict (‘the Convention’) informs us that High Contract Parties (HCPs) agree that ‘protection cannot be effective unless both national and international measures have been taken to organize it in time of peace’. The Convention, and its accompanying Regulations for Execution (‘Regulations’), lays out obligations, measures, and principles of action to be undertaken collaboratively by the civil and military authorities of signatory states, beginning in peacetime: the measures of safeguarding, detailed throughout the Convention, which are the lead responsibility of civilian agents of the state; and the measures of respect, detailed in Article 4, which are the lead responsibility of state party armed forces before, and especially during, conflict itself.

The successful realisation of both pillars – safeguarding and respect – is entirely conditional on leadership provided by both state parties and international bureaucracies. This chapter suggests that leadership, here understood as a key enabler, has been under-represented in cultural property protection (CPP) discourse since 1954. The reasons why leadership, like so much of the 1954 Hague Convention, has largely been ignored are complex and, given the paucity of either research or operational experience, difficult to frame objectively. This chapter argues for the central importance of leadership, especially at state party level, in activating the 1954 Hague Convention and making CPP an operational reality in conflict zones. As such, it complements a core theme of this volume: that the 1954 Convention is fit for purpose but has not been driven forward seriously by the majority of ratifying states.

The drafters of the Convention were very aware of the need for the role of due process in establishing a framework for the management of CPP. While the resulting treaty is heavy on management protocols, it deliberately stops short of outlining good practice for planning, its implementation, and tackling unforeseen events: it sets out what is to be done but not how. As discussed in the introduction and elsewhere in this volume, this is hardly surprising: states parties are sovereign; how they discharge their responsibilities in respect of CPP is for them to determine. That said, the Convention does provide a bureaucratic framework for international oversight.