Hard and Soft Law Measures for the Restitution of Colonial Cultural Collections – Country Report: The Netherlands

Abstract

This commentary offers an overview of the restitutions and claims processed in the Netherlands until recently, and the legal framework in which they took place. Although the focus is on restitutions to and claims from Indonesia, those to and from a number of other former colonial possessions occur as well. It thus looks at Dutch cultural heritage regulations and laws concerning colonial possessions. Next, the current situation is reviewed, with special attention paid to the Dutch Heritage Act of 2016 and the 2021 Policy Vision on Collections from a Colonial Context, and possible frictions between the two. In the final part, two comparisons are made. One is between how the Netherlands has been dealing with claims for Nazi-looted art works and with claims for items looted from colonial areas. The second comparison is between the current measures for dealing with colonial loot by the Netherlands and Belgium. For several years now, both countries have taken up more seriously the decolonization of state-owned collections from colonial contexts. However, the new policies of both countries have their limitations as well. For the Netherlands, the author concludes that this former major colonial power is in an intermediate phasein the process of developing new rules for dealing with objects and collections from colonial contexts.