My Letter to Senator Gillibrand

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New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand prides herself on transparent dealings with lobby groups, that's nice. So I am posting here my letter to her about her apparent patronage of the recent CPRI anti-CCPIA conference here, and I am hoping she will allow me to post here too any answer she may give. Maybe some readers would like to add their voice to mine, especially those from New-York-Based SAFE. Let us see how she justifies her apparent support for those in and around the US antiquities trade who we would be forgiven for believing are hell-bent on undermining what semblance of international cultural heritage protection the US has to offer, rather than strengthening it.

Dear Senator Gillibrand,
you have been named in connection with the organization of a conference in Washington under the title: „The Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (CCPIA): Is it working?”.

Given the tone and content of that meeting (summarized here http://www.cprinst.org/Home/issues), may I ask therefore whether you yourself actively support the International Cultural Property Protection program of the US government (http://exchanges.state.gov/heritage/culprop.html)?

Would you like to see a strengthening or weakening of the ability of the US to set a moral lead by helping stamp out the international trade in illicitly acquired cultural property and related criminal activity?

As you are no doubt aware, the CCPIA serves to regulate the import into the United States of certain designated groups of cultural property which is threatened by illegal activity from specific states. This is done by temporarily restricting items newly coming onto the US market from those states to those which have been legally exported. In this manner, responsible collectors purchasing items on that market can be assured that they are not running the risk of purchasing illicitly acquired material, with all that this may entail. I am sure you will have the same difficulty as me in seeing why any discriminating, responsible and ethical US collector would object to that.

There is however a group of US dealers in and collectors of antiquities and coins – together with their lawyers - who are actively challenging the US Government’s application of these measures. The motives of this group for wanting to challenge measures intended to keep illicitly-obtained material off the US markets can only be guessed. I can only hope that you were unaware that there were people associated with members of this milieu among the organizers of the conference you are named in connection with.

Senator Gillibrand, do you yourself, or those in your immediate environment, collect antiquities, or have any other connection to the global antiquities market and their other advocacy groups?

In the interests of transparency, may I post a copy of your office’s reply here: http://paul-barford.blogspot.com/2011/03/my-letter-to-senator-gillibrand.html?

Thank you for giving your time to reading this
Paul Barford

Thank you

I've just posted a brief note on this on the SAFE blog. Perhaps someone there might invite her and other politicians to in some way show some support for SAFE and its aims?

I note that in the list of topics in the Senator's contact form to choose from, there was no mention of culture or cultural property theft, suggesting this was not a matter about which Senator Gillbrand was expecting to get correspondence from citizens.

*PS because Americans can only imagine that the rest of the world's postal service works like theirs and nobody at all would want to ask a US Senator anything from outside the country, you can't send anything from outside without giving a Zip Code. It blocks you if you put a real postcode of another type. I therefore appended a random Washington DC one to my address. I do not expect she'll be writing back anyway, the letter is longer than it should be.