Cultural Property and Organised Crime: Reassessing the Role of Criminal Law

Illicit trafficking in cultural property has developed into a complex transnational phenomenon sustained by hybrid criminal dynamics. Contemporary trafficking patterns reveal increasing intersections with organised crime, terrorism financing and white-collar facilitation, which collectively exploit structural vulnerabilities in the art and antiquities market – opacity, informational asymmetries and limited regulatory oversight. Against this criminological background, the paper reviews the principal international and European legal responses. Although the overall framework for cultural-property protection has been strengthened, uneven implementation and gaps in harmonisation continue to hinder its effectiveness. Recent EU initiatives on import controls, asset recovery and anti-money-laundering supervision reflect a broader shift towards security and market-oriented regulation. These developments enhance enforcement capacity but also raise significant concerns regarding proportionality, legality and procedural guarantees, particularly in a field marked by evidentiary uncertainty and cross-border complexity. Ensuring coherence between preventive ambitions and fundamental-rights protection thus emerges as a central challenge. The paper argues that an effective response to illicit trafficking requires an integrated strategy that combines penal, regulatory and financial tools with measures addressing demand-side incentives and the role of upper-market actors, to safeguard both cultural heritage and the legitimacy of criminal-law intervention.