We, the undersigned organizations, take note of the adoption of the French law on the restitution of cultural property on 13 April 2026 (external link). This development responds to long-standing calls to remove procedural barriers to restitution and marks a shift from previous practice, which required separate legislation for the return of individual artifacts (external link).
However, the new law remains severely limited in scope and ambition. It introduces a mechanism for returns while leaving entirely unaddressed the very historical injustice that gave rise to restitution claims in the first place.
It is most striking that the new law avoids any explicit recognition of colonial violence as the central context of dispossession. This silence is difficult to justify given that the overwhelming majority of contested objects were acquired in explicitly colonial contexts marked by coercion, military conquest, and systemic domination. Instead, it relies on narrow legal categories such as "theft," "looting" or transfers under "duress," which isolate individual acts from the broader systems in which they occurred.
Colonial dispossession is thus treated as a series of irregular transactions, not as an organized system of extraction embedded in imperial rule. By detaching restitution from its historical context, the law avoids engaging with questions of responsibility, accountability, or historical injustice.
Instead, restitution must be understood within the broader framework of reparations, of which it forms one component, alongside measures such as satisfaction and truth‑telling. This understanding is well established in both law and practice and has been consistently reaffirmed under international law.
This omission stands in stark contrast to France's approach in other restitution contexts.
The new law also introduces significant limitations that constrain meaningful access to restitution. These include, first, a temporal restriction limiting eligible claims to objects taken between 1815 and 1972, thereby excluding substantial periods of colonial extraction. Second, it excludes entire categories of objects, including military items, public archives, and archaeological materials-many of which are directly connected to systems of colonial domination. Third, the law permits only state‑to‑state claims, thereby risking the exclusion of affected communities, traditional authorities, and other non‑state actors who were directly subjected to dispossession. Fourth, it imposes a high evidentiary threshold, requiring "serious, precise and consistent" proof of unlawful appropriation, notwithstanding the well‑documented archival gaps at the hands of the colonial administration. Finally, the law establishes a layered administrative process and conditions for requesting States that effectively shift the burden of action and proof onto those seeking restitution.
Together, these elements risk limiting restitution to a narrow set of cases while leaving broader claims unaddressed, absent any engagement with the structural dimensions of colonial dispossession. It also poses the risk of prolonging restitution claims, which are already hampered by a lengthy process. More fundamentally, the law reflects a familiar pattern in which recent Western efforts to address the colonial past take the form of political gesturing without substantive engagement. It reflects a deeper contradiction: the law advances a restitution agenda while depoliticizing and dehistoricizing the processes of colonial extraction that make restitution necessary in the first place.
Restitution must not be treated as a discretionary or purely moral undertaking. It reflects binding legal obligations rooted in the right to remedy under both international law and human rights law.
The dispossession of African peoples of their art and cultural objects constitutes a direct violation of their right freely to practice and enjoy their culture. The continued retention of these objects away from their communities of origin constitutes an ongoing harm and a breach of human rights law. In this context, France is under a duty to ensure fair, effective, and prompt access to restitution through appropriate legal and administrative measures. Where such measures fall short, they fail to discharge the State's obligations under both the law of state responsibility and human rights law, triggering a broader duty to provide reparations. This duty applies domestically and extraterritorially, extends to present and future generations, and requires full reparation of the adverse consequences of human rights violations.
Further, at a time of growing international momentum around reparations - including recent developments at the United Nations (external link) and the African Union (external link) - the new law falls short of what is required. It risks reducing restitution to a technical, administrative exercise rather than part and parcel of a broader process of reparative justice. What is urgently needed instead is a restitution framework that:
- explicitly recognizes colonial dispossession as a system of violence and extraction;
- situates restitution within broader processes of reparative justice;
- expands access beyond state-to-state claims to include affected communities, traditional authorities, and other non-state actors;
- removes arbitrary temporal and categorical limitations;
- ensures that restitution is not subject to conditionality that reproduces existing power imbalances.
Restitution cannot be reduced to the management of individual objects. It must engage with the systems of violence and extraction through which those objects were taken. Without that recognition, any framework for restitution will remain incomplete.
We therefore call on France and other former colonial powers to move beyond symbolic measures and engage in processes that reflect the scale and nature of historical harm.
We further call on governments, international organizations, cultural institutions, and civil society to build on the existing momentum and work towards restitution frameworks grounded in historical recognition, accountability, and structural repair.
Signatories:
African Futures Lab
Pan African Lawyers Union (PALU)
Reform Initiatives