by ADA | Jun 24, 2026 | Uncategorized |
Out now for almost six months, the World Customs Organisation’s latest Illicit Trade Report (ITR) covers the year 2024. The introduction hails the report as offering “a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics and evolving trends of illicit trade. This edition underscores the complexity and adaptability of transnational criminal networks, highlighting impacts on public safety, global security, and sustainable development.”
So what does the highly detailed and analytical 305-page report have to say about cultural property crime?
Very little indeed.
On page 23, a bar chart provides The Number of Responses to the WCO Seizure Statistics. These appear to refer to the number of customs forces who have replied to a WCO survey asking for the number and volume of seizures in their jurisdiction. Responses concerning cultural goods rose from around 29 to 33 year-on-year to 2024.
A bubble chart on the following page appears to show a 75% rise in the number of cases involving cultural goods with a rise in the volume of goods seized somewhere below 5%. However, it also shows that the volume is tiny compared to any other form of illicit activity except for Explosive Precursors – chemicals that can be used in the creation of explosives.
On the following bubble chart showing year on year trends, cultural goods do not appear at all.
Chart 4 on page 26 illustrates priorities by commodity, with Cultural Goods listed as an Essential priority for around four out of 70 Customs administrations – the lowest score for any commodity. Around another eight administrations see it as a High priority, again the lowest score, and by some distance compared to most other commodities. These ratings remain almost unchanged from 2023, as the next bar chart shows us on page 27.
The attraction of fungible items
A key consideration making commodities attractive for money laundering is their fungibility, according to the introduction to the chapter on ML on page 37: “…the majority of these cases involve the illicit movement of bulk cash, but also include significant quantities of gold, rhodium, silver, and precious stones, including diamonds. These materials, due to their high value-to-weight ratio, fungibility, and ease of transport, remain attractive to criminal networks seeking to transfer or launder proceeds across borders while evading detection.”
As readers will know, a distinctive feature about artworks and antiquities is that they are not fungible.
Much of the Money Laundering and Counter Terrorism Financing chapter is dedicated to currency and gold smuggling – by far the biggest problem it identifies when it comes to ML, with an additional issue involving agricultural equipment in Brazil.
Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh and India reported the most cases, with Japan, Turkey and Sri Lanka next. All countries on the list are in the Middle East, Far East, Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. On page 68, the report concludes re ML: “The consistent involvement of departure points like UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Hong Kong-China, and destination corridors into India, Türkiye, Japan, and Bangladesh, suggests entrenched regional laundering networks that demand multi-jurisdictional enforcement.” Note: ‘regional’.
Jewellery and the high-risk traveller
On page 63, it reports: “Jewellery smuggling via couriers remains a key modality: The high number of pieces seized in Saudi Arabia, Türkiye, and Japan indicates frequent interception of concealed jewellery worn or carried by passengers, underlining the importance of profiling high-risk travellers and body-worn concealment detection.”
Overall, the ITR is extremely detailed, providing numerous graphs, data sets, case studies and photographs of seizures on extensive chapters concerning ML and terrorism financing, drug trafficking, environmental crime, intellectual property rights, health and safety, revenue fraud and smuggling, and security breaches.
Cultural goods had their own chapter – albeit revealing just how small the problem is – for several years until the early 2020s. No more, however.
Considering the level of intelligence in every other sphere of interest across such a wide number of jurisdictions, it is hardly credible that the dearth of data when it comes to cultural goods can be explained entirely by under reporting. At no point in any past WCO report have cultural goods ever shown any significant contribution to illicit trade on a global scale in comparison to other spheres. Now they show even less, despite all the lobbying claims to the contrary.
Customs administrations have consistently ranked it as their lowest priority. Could this be because it is the smallest issue that they face in this context?
by ADA | Feb 27, 2020 | News, Uncategorized |
2018 Illicit Trade Report lists Cultural Property as just 0.08% of global illicit trade compared to other risk sectors
The World Customs Organisation’s latest Illicit Trade Report covers 2018, shows a decline in Cultural Property crime, while also demonstrating how it is dwarfed by other sectors of trafficking, such as drugs, weapons and counterfeit goods, accounting for just 0.08% of all reported cases and seizures.
Cultural Property crime includes at least 12 categories of Cultural Property, ranging from household goods to jewellery, books and manuscripts and even flora and fauna. Antiquities form a small part of this category and the WCO does not even record separate figures for them, but does do so for archaeological items.
In summary, the number of reported cases globally in 2018 was 98, down from 155 in 2017. Reported seizures globally fell from 193 to 123, while items seized fell from 15,865 to 15,689. Although currency items seized rose from 9,431 to 13,391, archaeological items seized fell by more than half from 703 to 314.
Spread of cases and seizures
In all, Cultural Property accounted for 0.08% of all cases and seizures across all categories of trafficking. By contrast, Drugs accounted for 39% of case and 32% of seizures, with other categories accounting for shares as follows: Counterfeit Goods (29%/39%); Alcohol & Tobacco (22.5%/20%); Medical Products (4.3%/3.7%); Weapons and Ammunition (2.4%/3.6%) and Environmental Products (2.1%/1.8%).
Published in December 2019, the report records cases and seizures reported through the Customs Enforcement Network (CEN) in in its statistical analysis, although it also includes case studies of other crimes. However, some of these are years old – one dates to 2002, for example.
Analysis of the report by the International Association of Dealers in Ancient Art (IADAA) includes graphics to show the vast difference in sector risks.
With detailed WCO figures for several years running now available, it is clear just how inaccurate claims are of a multi-billion dollar international trafficking network in antiquities, despite such claims driving forward policy and restrictive new laws such as the new EU import licensing regulations.
by Antiquities Dealers' Association | Jan 25, 2019 | News, Uncategorized |
The World Customs Organisation published its latest report into illicit trade in December.
The size of any problem can be assessed under four variables: the number of cases, the number of seizures, the volume of seized material and the value of that material. As the ADA and IADAA have always argued, by any of these variables, Cultural Heritage – of which Antiquities form only a part – barely registers as a problem area among the risk categories listed.
IADAA has conducted its own potted analysis of the 205-page WCO report as a user-friendly guide to the findings, which includes a direct link to the original report for verification purposes.
As the analysis and the original report show, at one end of the scale Drugs-related cases make up 47.7% of global trafficking; at the other, Cultural Heritage represents 0.2%. Likewise, when it comes to the number of seizures, Drugs accounts for 42.8%, while Cultural Heritage covers 0.2%. The next smallest category in each of these measures is Environmental Products, which accounts for 2.7% and 2.3% respectively. Even these figures are, respectively, 16 times and 14 times larger than the Cultural Heritage measures.
All of the above also needs to be taken in the context of a more proficient international Customs operation that is better able to cope with Cultural Heritage than ever before, according to the WCO, with twice as many countries submitting data as the previous year (25 compared with 13). Despite this, the number of cases has slightly fallen, while the number of seizures has only risen from 158 to 167. Compare that to over 40,000 cases and over 43,000 seizures involving Drugs.
Comparative values
An exact assessment of values is not possible because the information is simply not available – although the report estimates the global illicit trade in Environmental Products to be worth between $91 billion and $250 billion. What is clear, however, is that, Cultural Heritage aside, the value of material seized in every other category must be worth at least in the hundreds of millions of dollars if not more.
When it comes to Cultural Heritage, although the number of cases has fallen and the number of seizures has only risen slightly, the number of items seized has increased from 9,931 to 14,754. These include all types of items across the range of categories covered by Cultural Heritage, from books & manuscripts and paintings to household items, jewellery, weapons, engravings and lithographs, as well as film and sound archives, the last of which makes up a very large number of items seized (3,169, according to the WCO report).
Antiquities make up 8725 items, a rise from 8005 in 2016.
It is reasonable to assume that the WCO will include images of its most important seizures in the report. If so, then the quality of what has been seized is generally very low grade indeed. Bizarrely, they include a haul of long playing records seized in transit from the Netherlands to Turkey. As it is not illegal to export LPs from the Netherlands, it is not clear why they were seized.
The overwhelming majority of Antiquities items pictured are broken potsherds and coins – items that would not be covered by the UNESCO Convention.
As the IADAA analysis points out: “The only items of significant value pictured in the report have nothing to do with customs work, nor were they seized, but voluntarily returned when their owners/holders discovered that they might be tainted, so it is misleading for them to have been included”.
In summary, although this is not a scientific assessment, if the images used to illustrate the quality of antiquities seizures in the WCO report are anything to go by, a generous over-estimate of the value of items seized would be around $500,000. To put that in context, that is around 0.001% of the value of the next smallest category at most.
How Interpol are adding to the problem
If Customs are much more efficient and twice the number of countries – from all regions – are submitting data, where is the massive haul of cases and seizures one should expect if Cultural Heritage trafficking is the problem that anti-trade campaigners, politicians and others would have it? As the WCO itself concluded in its 2016 report: “As Customs officers become increasingly proficient in seizing both large and small shipments of cultural objects, the data can suggest that illicit trade is on the rise when, in reality, levels of trafficking may be holding constant or even decreasing.”
This also gives the lie to Interpol’s claim (as published on its Works of Art Crime home page) that “The black market in works of art is becoming as lucrative as those for drugs, weapons and counterfeit goods” – a claim it confusingly contradicts on the FAQs accessed via the same page. This is important because the European Commission and Parliament, among others, have used this headline claim by Interpol as evidence justifying the introduction of stringent new import licensing regulations in the EU.
IADAA was able to demonstrate during the consultation and negotiations over the import licensing proposals that even the European Commission’s own researches failed to find any problem at all, yet it insisted on pressing ahead with unnecessary and damaging legislation.
This summary analysis is being forwarded to those conducting the follow-up study commissioned by the European Commission after it expressed doubts about its original research. Hopefully these WCO statistics and other findings will make a difference.
by Antiquities Dealers' Association | Mar 5, 2018 | News, Uncategorized |
For some time now, anti-trade campaigners, NGOs, politicians and even international law enforcement agencies have stated that trafficked antiquities are the third largest source of terrorist financing after trafficked drugs and weapons. These claims have always been unsubstantiated and although Interpol quotes a similar claim on its Art Crime page (“The black market in works of art is becoming as lucrative as those for drugs, weapons and counterfeit goods”), it then contradicts this in detail in the Frequently Asked Questions on the same page.
Now, however, the World Customs Organisation has included figures for trafficked cultural property, including antiquities, in its annual report for the first time and this gives us a clearer picture of what the situation really is. In summary, this is what it says:
Number of Seizures
Drugs: c.45,000
Weapons and ammunition: c.4500
Cultural property: 146
Of which antiquities (mostly coins, seals and jewels): c.70
So in terms of the number of seizures across these three areas, drugs account for 90.6% of seizures, weapons and ammunition 9.1%, cultural property 0.3%, of which antiquities account for 0.14%.
Volumes
Although there is no direct correlation between the three areas in terms of volumes seized, summary totals give some indication of comparative scale:
Drugs: c.1.5 million kilos
Weapons and ammunition: c.2.5 million pieces
Cultural property: 8483 items
Of which Antiquities: c.6600 items (including coins)
Details:
- Drugs: 1 million kilos of cannabis, 180,773 kilos of cocaine, 99,000 kilos of khat, approx. 200,000 kilos of opiates, psychotropic and other substances. Total c.1.5 million kilos. Number of seizures: c.45,000.
- Weapons & ammunition: number of pieces seized c.2.5 million. Number of seizures: c.4500.
- Cultural Property: 8483 objects seized (Of which Antiquities c.6600). Number of seizures: 146. (Of which Antiquities c.70)
Also included in the report are figures for seizures linked to environmental (i.e. animal and plant) products. Again, exact comparisons are not easy, but the number of seized items alone rises towards the 750,000 mark, while the total number of seizures reported was 2225.
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