CYIL 2015

PETR VÁLEK CYIL 6 ȍ2015Ȏ At the next COJUR meeting in December 2013 the Czech Republic and Austria invited other EU Member States to sign the Declaration. At the 47 th meeting of CAHDI meeting in March 2014 they presented the text of the Declaration to the Council of Europe members and made the same invitation to them to become signatories. In addition, although the Declaration is not a treaty, the Council of Europe Secretariat agreed to serve as a “depositary” for this instrument, i.e. to keep the signed originals of the Declaration and update the list of its signatories (the Secretariat made the Declaration available also in French, the other official language of Council of Europe). In order to fulfill this role, the Council of Europe Secretariat set up a special website. 28 As of September 2015 the following States have signed the Declaration: the Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Romania, Latvia, Estonia, Georgia, Albania, the Netherlands, France, Armenia, Belgium and Belarus. A few States have responded that they will not join the Declaration, giving different reasons for their decisions. Germany has taken a critical approach to the UN Convention at the time of its adoption and vigorously followed this approach also in case of the Declaration, as its text was based on this Convention. The United Kingdom, while being supportive to the idea behind the Declaration, has detailed domestic legislation on the subject that (according to the British view) does not enable this country to become a signatory of the Declaration. Other countries indicated, however, that they will be in a position to sign the Declaration soon, once their internal approval procedure is finished. 4. Evaluating the Czech-Austrian Declaration: Was It Worth the Effort? At the outset, I have to admit that – as one of the “fathers” of the Declaration who spent a lot of time working on this project – I may not be perhaps the right person to write this evaluation. Nevertheless, I believe that this Declaration has been quite useful for the Czech Republic – and might be useful for other States as well – for the following reasons: First, the Declaration is right on the target of promoting “the mobility of State owned cultural property” stipulated in its preamble, because it makes the lending of such property less complicated. Instead of negotiating a guarantee in the form of a diplomatic note or a letter by a competent minister (which is usually requested by the Czech institutions responsible for the respective art object), it is much easier and faster for the Czech Republic just to ask the borrowing country to sign the Declaration. In 2015 there was a situation when the Declaration substantially facilitated the organization of an exhibition in one European country. Second, the Declaration strengthens the rules of international law on State immunity contained in the UN Convention by confirming their customary law 28 http://www.coe.int/en/web/cahdi/-/declaration-on-jurisdictional-immunities-of-state-owned-cultural property.

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