Auction in New York's Sotheby's (symbol picture)
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Several art and antique dealers as well as auction houses failed before the Federal Constitutional Court with complaints against the Cultural Property Protection Act.
The law, which came into force in 2016, regulates, for example, which art may be performed or must remain in the country as particularly significant and identity-creating.
According to information on Tuesday, the complainants had wanted to assert, among other things, a violation of their freedom of occupation and their fundamental right to property.
However, they should have turned to specialized courts for this, decided the second chamber of the First Senate at the Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe at the end of June.
The constitutional complaints are inadmissible.
The court explained that, among other things, specialized courts are to be interpreted as being responsible for what is named in the law as “reasonable expense”.
The "export ban with reservation of authorization" also requires clarification by a specialist court in order to see whether in many cases massive delays occur that make short-term exports impossible.
The court also lists processing deadlines, possible international competitive disadvantages due to "insufficient exportability" and questions about the effort required for provenance checks - that is, the origin of works of art and cultural goods - which specialist courts would first have to decide on.
hpi / dpa