The ratification aims to accompany the efforts of the international community to fight against the illicit trafficking of cultural property and it is part of its strategy to protect cultural heritage and recover the illegally exported property, the ministry said in a statement.
On February 2003, Morocco approved the convention supplementing the UNESCO 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import,, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property.
The UNIDROIT Convention aims to protect cultural heritage by establishing a legal framework for the return of cultural property in a unified and simple fashion, through reinforced international cultural cooperation and facilitated return of cultural property.
This convention allows a contracting state to request the court or other competent authority of another contracting state to order the return of a cultural object illegally exported from the territory of the requesting State.
These conventions are in addition to Morocco’s efforts to combat illegal trafficking of cultural property and their return, including the signing of a MoU with the United States in 2021 that provides, among other things, for procedures to combat illegal trafficking in archaeological and ethnographic objects from Morocco.
As a result of this memorandum, Morocco was able to return the fossil skull of a 56-million-year-old crocodile from the phosphate chain deposits near Khouribga in February 2022.
