This paper demonstrates that analyzing the legal structure of the global regime for cultural property trade by way of separating the different layers of regulation may help underline the problems of coordination, effectiveness and enforcement of the legal regimes for the art market.
Among the main challenges for the development of this area of the law it seems to be how to reconcile the idea of an economic value of cultural property, entailing a licit tradability of culture, on the one hand, with the protection of cultural rights of individuals and communities, on the other hand. In this direction the paper shows that (a) in this matter traditional international hard-law is insufficient to gain a proper enforcement of any legal regime; (b) an important supplementing role is played by soft-law rules both in regulating and enforcing legal regimes for the protection of cultural objects, and that (c) a growing role in the enforcement process is left to adjudication approaches that can be nurtured by soft-law and/or can be oriented to convey cultural property protection into the domain of human rights law. In this latter perspective, enforcement of cultural property law through international investment law and arbitration is particularly considered.
