It's Not Working, Dr Fischer

Paul Harper, 'British museum returns Babylon treasure looted from Iraq after US invasion', Metro Friday 30 Aug 2019

The British Museum will hand the tablets back to the Iraq National Museum. Hartwig Fischer, Director of the British Museum, said: ‘We are absolutely committed to the fight against illicit trade and damage to cultural heritage. ‘This is an issue which concerns us all. I am delighted that we are able to assist in the return of these important objects to Iraq.’ [...] The British Museum displays extremely valuable looted treasures.  

It is not the British Museum that is handing these objects back, but HM government, the BM is just a box where they are stored. The BM has done nothing much about illicit trade of objects on the British antiquities market, they once made a pretence at monitoring EBay for illegally-handled treasure items from the UK, but that today is nothing more than an old news item, hundreds of dodgy objects go through eBay with no reaction from them (I reported some items a few months ago, the PAS/BM staff told me in effect to buzz off and chase it up myself with the local police station of the home of the seller in the UK - letters on file if you doubt that). Likewise the PAS actively promotes artefact hunting as some form of  white-guys' "citizen archaeology". It's just the brown skinned folk in places like Iraq they will criticise.  Likewise their cunies and sculptures in that big long gallery in the BM were dug up by white guys and taken away from the brown guys when they could damage the cultural heritage of archaeological sites all over the Middle East, and now their own self-proclaimed 'empowerment' has been taken away, they are jealously making sure nobody else can try to reap the same benefits.