UNESCO can’t help Russia to return Scythian gold that was taken out of Crimean museums for an exhibition in the Netherlands. The Permanent Representative of the Russian Federation to the organization Eleonora Mitrofanova informed about that, RIA Novosti (Crimea) reports.
“Unfortunately, UNESCO really can’t help in this question. We conducted a search of all possible instruments developed by UNESCO that could help one way or the other in that context. There is absolutely none of them, it is a private-law matter. The difficulty is that the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture was the guarantor. So now it seems to be resolved in some three-party way. And I think that now Scythian gold will be permanently fixed in the Netherlands since it will be a long story,” Mitrofanova said at the video press conference arranged by the international news agency Rossiya Segodnya.
Crimean museum staff prepared reasoning for returning Scythian gold to the peninsula. About two thousand artifacts were taken out of Crimea for the exhibition “Crimea: gold and secrets of the Black Sea” in the Allard Pierson Archaeological Museum in Amsterdam at the beginning of February 2014.
At the end of November 2014 four Crimean museums applied a class action lawsuit against the Allard Pierson Museum to the Amsterdam court demanding to return the collection of Scythian gold from the Netherlands to Crimea.
Both Ukraine and Russia put in a claim for exhibit items that were taken out of the peninsula. In this regard, the University of Amsterdam suspended the returning objects of value until the dispute is resolved on the legal basis or the parties reach an agreement.
As a reminder, the people’s deputies of Ukraine offered to address the members of parliament of the Netherlands with a request to return Scythian gold to Ukraine.
