Nigeria's president has approved a decree transferring ownership of objects from the historic kingdom of Benin to Oba Ewuare II. The order grants the Oba possession of all works of art that were looted from the royal palace in Benin by British troops during a punitive expedition in 1897.
The Swiss ethnologist Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin has called the operation a "fiasco" for having been done without conditions, without even ensuring that the bronzes were going to be in the public domain and exhibited in a museum.