La tutela penale del patrimonio culturale mobile: esigenze di riforma alla luce degli impulsi internazionali

The essay provides an overview of international law pertaining to cultural heritage protection, particularly in relation to movable cultural properties and related risks of dispersion and trafficking, aimed at providing useful starting points for a discussion of national and international criminal law policies in this area. More specifically, after analyzing the nature and definition of the objects of protection within international conventions and documents, the paper retraces what scanty and fragmentary provisions for the criminalization of offences against cultural heritage can be found in international law (also with a specific attention to regional sources at European level), in order to draw a comprehensive picture of current trends and open problems in international criminal law policies with respect to cultural property trafficking, its prevention and its repression. Special attention is paid to the tendency to turn to ‘non-specific’ international conventions (mainly to the UN Convention against Transnational Organized Crime) as a way to bypass traditional disagreements over criminalization of offences against cultural heritage between source and market Countries, as well as an effective tool to fight a perceived increase in the involvement of organized criminal groups in cultural property trafficking. Finally, an attempt is made to define in a more precise way what ‘trafficking’ is, and how this typically international terminology could possibly be translated into national criminal law offences, also in the light of the most recent efforts of UN agencies (particularly UNODC) to establish a set of Guidelines for Crime Prevention and Criminal Justice Responses with Respect to Trafficking in Cultural Property and Other Related Offences.