"Lord Elgin always claimed that he had obtained a firman from the Ottomans (who were then occupying Greece)," she explains; however, there is no evidence of such authorisation. In other words, he did not have the real ownership when he sold the fragments to England in 1816, for the equivalent of 4 million pounds today. The researcher speaks, on the other hand, of possible corruption of Ottoman officials in Athens, the English Parliament of the time having voted the equivalent of 2.5 million pounds today for what it described as "gifts".
In The Parthenon Marbles and International Law, Catharine Titi goes further. The researcher points out that international jurisprudence and the customary law of States are now leaning towards restitution. It recalls the 1962 sentence of the International Court of Justice in the case of the Temple of Preah Vihear, obliging Thailand to return to Cambodia the objects taken from that temple. "This judgment makes it clear that...
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