Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, adopted at The Hague on 14 May 1954, together with its two Protocols (1954 and 1999).
This Convention establishes special protection for the cultural heritage of peoples. Its First Protocol (1954) aims to prevent the export of cultural property from a territory occupied, in whole or in part, by a State Party to the Convention.
"Damage to cultural property, to whatever people it may belong, constitutes damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world."
The Constitutive Act of UNESCO rests on the fundamental idea that culture, by fostering understanding and mutual esteem among peoples, can play an essential role in ensuring that suspicion and mistrust between nations no longer lead, as in the past, to war, for — as it states — "since wars begin in the minds of men, it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be constructed."
Unfortunately, culture, which is meant to help build a more peaceful world, is itself threatened by war, through the destruction of the property that constitutes its tangible testimony. War has always represented the principal danger to the integrity of cultural property, and even today armed conflicts remain the leading cause of the destruction and degradation of the cultural and spiritual heritage of peoples. The destruction of a monument, a library, or a work of art constitutes an incalculable loss, for such property is an expression of the identity and history of a people.
Such a loss is all the more intolerable when the destruction is carried out deliberately, as during the conflicts that took place on the territory of the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. The devastation and systematic plunder of cultural property were then an integral part of the activities known as "ethnic cleansing," which sought the total elimination — both physical and moral — of the enemy.
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the international law of armed conflict has developed specific rules for the protection of cultural property, among them Articles 27 and 56 of the Hague Regulations of 1899 and 1907, Article 5 of the Hague Convention (IX) of 1907, and the Roerich Pact, adopted in 1935 within the framework of the Pan American Union. The most significant body of rules in this field, however, remains the system established by the Hague Convention of 1954: a set of instruments adopted at The Hague on 14 May 1954 by an Intergovernmental Conference on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, comprising a Convention, Regulations for its execution, an Optional Protocol intended to prevent the export of cultural property from occupied territories and to secure its return at the close of hostilities, and three resolutions concerning the armed forces, a national advisory committee, and the periodic convening of the High Contracting Parties.
To these instruments was added the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention, which incorporates developments in international humanitarian law, international criminal law, and the law relating to the protection of cultural heritage. Entering into force three months after the deposit of the twentieth instrument of ratification, it represents a decisive advance in improving the situation of cultural property in the event of armed conflict.
The armed conflicts that occurred after 1954 — in particular those in the former Yugoslavia, marked by the deliberate destruction of the Mostar Bridge and the shelling of the old town of Dubrovnik — revealed certain shortcomings in the implementation of the original Convention, and led UNESCO, as early as 1991, to open a process of review. After several expert meetings (The Hague 1993, Lauswolt 1994, Paris 1994 and 1997, Vienna 1998), the Diplomatic Conference convened by the Government of the Netherlands from 15 to 26 March 1999 adopted the text of the Second Protocol by consensus. Its Guidelines were subsequently adopted and then amended by the Meetings of the Parties, the most recent revision dating from 12 December 2011 at UNESCO Headquarters.
Summary based on the article by Vittorio Mainetti (Graduate Institute of International Studies, Geneva / University of Milan), International Review of the Red Cross, June 2004, vol. 86, no. 854.
