Verbatim report of proceedings

Wednesday, 24 October 2018 - Strasbourg

Import of cultural goods (debate)

  Daniel Dalton, Rapporteur. – Mr President, I would like to thank colleagues for all their statements. We all have the same goal here, namely to tighten rules to prevent the illicit import of cultural goods, and there is clearly consensus for that across the House. But that doesn’t mean that we support all and every measure that is proposed, particularly those that could punish legitimate traders or keep European cultural heritage out of Europe. That’s what a lot of this text does, and we’ve got to be very careful to make sure it doesn’t do that.

The grandfather clock, for example: if that goes outside Europe, you may well not be able to bring it back in. Similarly with the point that Mr Marias was making: if those go out of Europe and you can’t get the approval of the source country to get a licence to bring them back in, under these proposals you’re going to struggle to get European goods back into Europe. No one wants that. I know no one in this House wants that. That’s the point that I’ve been trying to make in these whole discussions, and that’s the problem we still have with this file as it is now. Yes, we need to be very, very strong on terrorist financing and we need to make sure we clamp down on that illicit and serious organised crime route into Europe. But let’s not punish legitimate arts traders, people that have got books – because some books are still covered by this – and a whole range of other European artefacts that we want to make sure can come back into Europe legitimately.

That’s all I’ve asked throughout this process. We have a proposal on the table that I’m not 100% happy with. I’m not going to oppose it and I hope that, in the negotiations with the Council, we can come together to get a final agreement that does look along those lines: do what everyone in this room wants to make sure that we hammer down that potential loophole on terrorist financing but that we do not hurt legitimate traders and legitimate people that have legitimate European cultural heritage.