Restitutions: the government will present three framework laws in 2023

The year 2023 will be the year of restitutions, if we are to believe the announcement made by the Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak, in an interview with

.

No less than three framework laws will be presented to parliament, the first aimed at facilitating the return of foreign cultural objects and the second, the restitution of human remains kept in museums.

The third text will give a boost to the movement of restitutions concerning Jewish property looted during the Occupation.

explains the minister.

These laws should make it possible to modify the heritage code, and authorize, if necessary, the removal of one or more objects from the national collections - the latter being deemed inalienable.

Recently, the return of eleven works to the heirs of Armand Dorville, a Jewish lawyer who died in 1941 and whose art collection was dispersed in Nice in 1942, forced the government to pass a law.

The eleven works had indeed been acquired by the Louvre, and were part of the museum's collections.

Similarly, the return of 26 regalia from Dahomey to present-day Benin required a passage before parliament, the objects being kept in the Quai Branly museum.

Emmanuel Macron, who has made the restitution of African works of art an axis of his foreign policy, has instructed the former president and director of the Louvre, Jean-Luc Martinez, to set a doctrine and criteria.

Its report is due in the coming weeks, the ministry said.

According to the Sarr-Savoy report, nearly 90,000 African works are kept in several French museums.

Census work is underway to determine what has been looted, should in principle be returned and to whom.

More delicate will be the third framework law on the restitution of human remains.

The Musée de l'Homme has 30,000 of them, for example, some of which date from the colonial period.

In 2010, heads of Maori Polynesians were returned to New Zealand, thanks to a law.

It is the centrist senator Catherine Morin-Desailly who will be in charge of this very delicate project.