Cultural heritage: which tools for resolving international disputes? This is being discussed in Florence on Friday 25 October, on the occasion of a conference organized at the Chamber of Commerce of the Tuscan capital which will be attended, among others, by the former Minister of Culture Francesco Rutelli, the director of the Offices Eike Schmidt, and Evgeniya Goriatcheva, senior legal counsel of the Permanent Court of Arbitration of The Hague, the intergovernmental organization founded in 1899 to facilitate the settlement of disputes between member states through arbitration and other peaceful means of dispute resolution.
The Court, which Italy joined in 1900 and which today settles issues between 121 countries around the world, ranges in many fields: not only cultural heritage but also the delimitation of land and sea borders, sovereignty, human rights, international investments and foreign and internal trade,
The event, which brings together operators from the art world, jurists and international institutions, has the precise aim of outlining the problems and possible means of resolving disputes regarding works of art and cultural heritage, and will be developed over three sessions. In the first, the operators of the art world will outline the problems that can give rise to conflicts. In the following two sessions, international jurists will illustrate the potential of negotiation, mediation and arbitration in resolving this type of dispute.
The conference is sponsored by the Italian National Commission Unesco, by the International Mediation Institute (IMI), by the Faculty of Law of the University of Milan-Bicocca, by the Department of Legal Sciences of the University of Bologna Alma mater studiorum, and by the Italian section of the International Law Association.
