[kingsurfer]

"The family are very upset by the outcome but nevertheless they have confidence in the British Museum's commitment to restitution. The government needs to move swiftly."

__________________________________________________________

Naturally they should be returned but those bloody Elgin Marbles really screw things up time and time again.

[passionfruit]

wWas this a case involving Madelyn Albright's family, or no. I thought I read a couple of years ago that her father was a Nazi uppity up and that they had come into posession of art and treasures plundered from Jews.

[passionfruit]

I just did some looking, and the story about plundered art being in the posession of Madelyn Albright's family is at http://www.praguepost.cz/news051700f.html

[Lazamataz]

Vice-Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt ruled that the British Museum Act - which protects the collections for posterity - cannot be overridden by the ethical merit of a claim involving plundered art.

Britain has gone quite mad, so why wouldn't it now subscribe to the notion that "We stole it fair and square."

[freepatriot32]

Libertarian ping.To be added or removed from my ping list freepmail me or post a message here

[gridlock]

Vice-Chancellor Sir Andrew Morritt ruled that the British Museum Act - which protects the collections for posterity - cannot be overridden by the ethical merit of a claim involving plundered art.

Rightly so. This individual case may be tragic, but at some point you just have to say what is done is done and carry on, at least with regards to tangible property. Europe was torn asunder, millions were killed, and some people's stuff was misplaced. These four drawings are just the barest sliver of the tip of the iceberg. It is not possible to right all the wrongs of that era, but the British and the Allies paid the price in blood to stop the largest of them.

If this family has an issue, it is with the NAZIs or with the successor German government. The British Museum did not do the stealing here.

Look at it another way. If the sharp-eyed collector had not bought those items for the British Museum way back when, they probably would have had clown faces painted over them and been lost forever.

[libertylover]

Wait a minute, now. I think the court simply ruled on the law as written, as opposed to making up a new law from the bench - judicial activism. In 2000, the Florida Supreme Court completely ignored the law as written and tried to make up their own law before the U.S. Supreme Court slapped them down.

It's a wakeup call to British Parliment, i.e., change the law regarding stolen Nazi art so that the law is in accordance with the "moral obligation".

[Sloth]

The museum's trustees had asked the Attorney General if they had permission to return the artworks under the terms of the Snowdon principle - a legal test that permits charities to give back items judged wrong to keep.

What kind of insane country has laws that prohibit giving something away?

[shellshocked]

Maybe so many Jews will stop calling for disarming the masses. Maybe they will realize that they should defend themselves and their pproperty in the first place.

[sheik yerbouty]

Thievery by any other name...

[ozzymandus]

The Russians have warehouses full of this type of stuff, and they have no intention of ever returning it. The have so much loot, they've never even cataloged it.

[johnb838]

They ought to return that stone under the throne to Scotland, and the crown jewels to India too. If England returned everything they had that was plundered, there wouldn't be anything left!

In other news, did you know the United States Capitol building was built with Slave Labor?