Recent developments in restitution

Introduction to restitution

In recent years there have been several important developments in the restitution of art and cultural property.

Restitution is a term which has historically been used in the context of Holocaust-looted art, but it is now often has a broader meaning, covering Holocaust related events, cultural restitution, and stolen property more generally.

Overlaying the history and development of restitution are two frameworks that don’t always move in the same direction or at the same speed. On the one hand are morality and ethics; different people draw their lines in different places at different times. On the other is the law, which is not the same everywhere and changes from time to time, driven in part by the very same morality and ethics.

The 1998 Washington Principles on Nazi-Confiscated Art (the "Washington Principles")

It is eighty years since the end of the Second World War in Europe, but it took the adoption as late as 1998 of the Washington Principles to create an internationally-endorsed set of principles and actions intended to lead to “fair and just solutions”. Neither the Washington Principles nor subsequent guidance and declarations, such as the Terezin Declaration in 2009, were or are legally binding.

Only a few states have taken the steps envisaged by the Washington Principles, but those that have are significant in the art market. The UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and the United States formulated different policies and have made recent changes to their approaches. The multiple instruments, some new, covering restitution in these jurisdictions will support existing measures to enable victims of spoliation, and their estates, to continue pursuing claims for the return of art and cultural property. Although facing challenges, the Washington Principles appear unlikely to face the sort of immediate decline that some predict.

The UK

The UK's Spoliation Advisory Panel (the "Spoliation Panel"), established by the government in 2000, is a group of ten experts appointed to review claims by a person or their estate for the return of cultural objects lost during the Nazi era (1933-1945). It is intended as an alternative to litigation. Though its decisions are not legally binding, two examples demonstrate its ability to reach broadly fair and just solutions.

John Constable's Beaching a boat, Brighton (1824) was looted from Hungary at some point between 1944 and 1945 and donated to the Tate in 1986. After a request from Baron Ferenc Hatvany's heirs, the Spoliation Panel decided in 2016 that it should be restituted to them, despite the Tate arguing otherwise. The heirs subsequently sold the painting at Christie's.

Gustave Courbet painted La Ronde Enfantine in 1862. It was looted from the apartment of a Jewish family in Paris in 1941, held for the benefit of Hermann Göring, and found its way via the Swiss art dealer, Kurt Meissner, into the hands of the Dean of York, who donated it to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1951. In 2023, the Spoliation Panel decided it should be restituted to the heirs of Robert Bing, from whose apartment it had been looted. The panel emphasised, however, that the Dean of York and the Fitzwilliam Museum had "acted honourably and in accordance with the standards prevailing at the time of acquisition and since."

The Spoliation Panel's job was perhaps made easier in both cases because the museums had received the paintings as donations. They were not left out of pocket for the costs of the original acquisitions. More broadly, some museums in the UK now have an easier route to restitution. On 27 November 2025 a long-awaited ordinance of the Charities Act 2022 came into force, allowing charities to make ex gratia restitutions of a value up to £20,000 without the Charity Commission's permission, although sixteen "national" institutions are excluded from this provision.

France

The French government established the Commission pour la restitution des biens et l’indemnisation des victims de spoliations antisemites ("CIVS") in 1999. It investigates claims and makes recommendations for the reparation, compensation or restitution of cultural property. Since 2023, its remit extends to works in public museums and collections, so that where restitution is recommended by the CIVS no specific act of parliament is needed to approve it.

Like the non-binding recommendations of the UK's Spoliation Panel, the CIVS' legally-binding rulings have been an effective tool for securing reasonably just outcomes to restitution disputes. Two examples show the contrasting impact of French law on different factual situations.

Camille Pissarro's La Bergere Rentrant des Moutons (1886) was the subject of a claim against the University of Oklahoma by the heir of the dispossessed owner. In 2016, it was agreed by the parties that the heir would donate the work to a French museum of her choice on terms that its time would be split between that museum and the University's museum. However, the Musee d’Orsay would not accept the donation with the split arrangement, so the claimant chose to challenge the original settlement in the French court, where she lost. On the facts, this process has upheld what appears to have been a reasonably fair and just solution in the manner envisaged by the Washington Principles.

In 2017, an American collector lent Camille Pissarro's La Cueillette des Pois (1887) for an exhibition in Paris, only for it to be seized as looted art. The collector had owned the work for twenty years after buying it in good faith at public auction. The French courts applied a 1945 French law to hold the work still belonged to the heirs of the victim, a Jewish industrialist named Simon Bauer. The America collector, who had done nothing wrong and had generously lent the work for public exhibition, was left out of pocket for what he had paid for the work which was later sold by the heirs at auction. Unlike the Pissarro case, here the contemporary owner lost out in circumstances that make the outcome feel like less of a fair and just solution.

Germany

In 2024, Germany switched from the UK's non-binding approach to a new binding arbitration process in the French mode. From 1 December 2025, this new arbitration system provides unilateral access for claimants. It remains to be seen how that will work and whether it will result in a more efficient process than its predecessor, which was remarkably unproductive.

Founded in 2003, the Advisory commission on the return of cultural property seized as a result of Nazi persecution, especially Jewish property (known as the "Limbach Commission") provided non-binding recommendations for resolving restitution claims. During its eighteen-year lifetime, the Limbach Commission dealt with only twenty cases. One of these cases concerned Bernardo Bellotto's works Karlskirche in Vienna (1760) and The Zwinger Moat in Dresden (1758). They were purchased from Max Emden, a Jewish art collector, in 1938 at an undervalue by an art dealer acting for Hitler. Allied forces seized the two paintings at the end of the war, after which they found their way into the German federal government collection in the 1960s. The Limbach Commission's decision in this case was significant because it recognised that goods not seized by the Nazis but instead sold by their owner to escape the Nazis or to fund livelihoods in exile could also be restituted.

Switzerland

In 2026, Switzerland will launch its Independent Committee for Cultural Property with a Burdened Past, which covers Holocaust-related claims and, more unusually, colonial-era property. It will issue non-binding recommendations with the aim of fair and just resolutions. Normally, it will need both parties to agree to the committee acting but, importantly, it can be engaged unilaterally for Nazi-looted art cases.

The US

Recent and upcoming state and federal legislation in the US is likely to strengthen claimants’ rights of restitution. In 2016, Congress passed the Holocaust Expropriated Art Recovery Act (known as the "HEAR Act"). The act grants a national six-year time limit to sue after discovery of matters amounting to actual knowledge that a claim exists. The HEAR Act has a sunset clause setting it to expire at the end of 2026, but a bill has been introduced into the Senate not only to extend the HEAR Act, but also to expand it. The bill aims to remove significant existing defences to a restitution claim, including those based on excessive delay in commencing proceedings, on prolonged and unchallenged possession or acquisition prescription and on the act of state doctrine. On 6 November 2025, the US Senate Judiciary Committee unanimously approved the bill, which will now go to the full Senate and then onward to the House of Representatives.

Likewise, the reaction of the State of California to the final ruling of the US Court of Appeals in the long running "Cassirer" litigation is indicative of the claimant-friendly legislative reforms afoot in the US. Camille Pisarro's Rue St Honore, Apres-Midi, Effet de Pluie (1897) was sold at an undervalue by a German Jew in 1939 shortly before they fled to England. The painting ended up in the Thyssen Bornemisza Collection in Madrid after the war. After a claim by the heir of the victim followed by many stages of litigation, the US Court of Appeals ruled that the Collection in Madrid owned the work and that the heir had no claim. In sum, this was because the Californian doctrine of comparative impairment meant that rather than Californian law, Spanish law applied, which favoured the Collection. In response, the State of California passed retrospective legislation, signed into law in September 2024, requiring the application of California substantive law to all claims brought under the HEAR Act. As intended by the Californian legislature, the US Supreme Court recently vacated the Court of Appeal's judgment and remanded the matter for further consideration under the new law by the US District Court for the Central District of California.

Are the Washington Principles at risk?

Despite fears that the Washington Principles are threatened, important jurisdictions in the art world continue to update their restitution processes and laws. The restitution teams at the major auction houses and bodies such as the Commission for Looted Art in Europe remain busy. Some large institutions, such as Glasgow Museums, have established or re-established their own restitution committees and research teams to look at the provenance of works in their own collections. The volume and scale of restitutions in recent years compared to earlier years strongly suggests that momentum is still building and there is much that can still be done.

However wider international progress seems more muted. According to a report in 2024 by the World Jewish Restitution Organisation, only seven of the countries that endorsed the 2009 Terezin Declaration have made major progress towards the restitution of Holocaust property. Thirteen countries have made some progress and twenty-four have made little or no progress. There are still thought to be over one hundred thousand missing works, and the passage of time will make it harder to trace the rightful heirs.

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