The Research On The Recovery Of Lost Cultural Relics From The Perspective Of International Law

As one of the four countries which have ancient civilizations,China has a long history and bright culture and is a large country which has extremely rich resources of cultural relics. However,from the opium war to the second world war,China suffered several times war. It made a large number of Chinese cultural relics be plundered to foreign countries. In the 1980 s, some criminals driven by excessive profit,stolen cultural relics, excavated ancient tombs and smuggled lawlessly and crazily. It also made China lose a lot of cultural relics.In the 21 st century, with the increase about China’s national strength and enhancement on the consciousness of the national cultural sovereignty, the government and folk begin to pay attention to the lost cultural relics and make positive efforts to recover them. In recent years, China has recovered some lost cultural relics. But compared to the total amount of the cultural relics lost overseas, that being recovered is a drop in the ocean. The achievement of the recovery of lost cultural relics is not outstanding. Because It involves a lot of problems, including the application of the international treaties, international habits and the various countries’ domestic law, and the match of diplomatic relations with countries and the strength of a country. All of these are the barriers of recovering cultural relicts. Therefore, the paper discusses the problem of recovering cultural relics from the perspective of international law in order to find the effective method to recover the lost cultural relics.The body of this paper is divided into the following several parts:The first part is the overview about the problem of recovering cultural relics, including the related concepts of cultural relics and the two theories about the ownership of recovering cultural relics.The second part introduces the international legal basis about the protection and restitution of lost cultural relics, including international convention, international customary law, regional and bilateral agreements.The third part introduces the main ways to recover the lost cultural relics, including the use of the international convention, international litigation and arbitration mechanism, diplomatic negotiations and consultation, and commercial channels.The fourth part introduced the problem of recovery of Chinese lost cultural relics, includingthe present situation of Chinese lost cultural relics, the practice of recovering and present situation of legislation. And give some advice for recovering lost cultural relics.In conclusion, based on the analysis of the feasibility and limitations about the way of recovering lost cultural relics, for the problem of recovery of Chinese lost cultural relics, the paper suggests not only make full use of the part of the convention, which is good for our country, and actively guide to make a new international rules, but also use synthetically the ways of litigation,diplomacy and negotiation. Only adopting diversified ways to recovering can our country maximize to make lost cultural relics return.