The Means for the Settlement of International Cultural Property Disputes: An Introduction

This paper is organised in five sections with some concluding remarks. The first section illustrates briefly the generally recognised means of dispute settlement under international law and at the level of different national jurisdictions. The second section covers the issue of the scope of the subject matter of the kind of disputes in question, with special regard to the concept of “cultural property”. The third section considers possible combinations of disputing parties according to their public or private legal personality. The fourth section refers to the highly diversified legal frameworks that provide the grounds upon which any given cultural property dispute may be addressed. The fifth section provides examples of how the international and domestic legal means of dispute settlement can operate concretely.