ANCHISE Talks 8 - The action of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

Implementing tools against illicit trafficking - A user’s perspective

On September 17 the ANCHISE Talks episode dedicated to The action of the Polish Ministry of Culture and National Heritage took place. It has been presented by Mariusz Wisniewski, Senior Expert of the Department of Polish National Heritage Abroad and War Losses, Poland's Department of Cultural Heritage. Dr. Huajian Liu from The Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft Institute specialized in applied science research, introduced the session. The meeting focused on the experience of the Polish Ministry of Culture’s Division for the Restitution of Cultural Goods and how it has integrated modern technology into the search and recovery of stolen or missing works of art over the last six years. Mariusz Wisniewski explained that the goal was not technology for its own sake, but faster and simpler processes that fit legal frameworks and serve the public. The division represents the State Treasury in litigation and restitution actions in Poland, the EU and abroad, and coordinates with police, customs, prosecutors, museums and other institutions. It manages national databases of stolen or illegally exported art and war losses, digitising archival data to create a strong data backbone for technological tools. 

The Ministry developed a twofold approach: automatic crawlers and reverse image search tools monitor auctions, museums and the art market every day, while an internal visual comparison engine allows very fast verification of items flagged by law enforcement. This system enables decisions in minutes, which is crucial given the speed of the art market. Examples included the recovery of a painting identified at a Japanese auction and a dagger stolen from a local museum, both recognised quickly thanks to image-matching technology. Cooperation with law enforcement in Poland is organised as a network of coordinators in each region for police, customs, border guards and prosecutors rather than a single special unit. This approach allows local knowledge and direct contact, but requires retraining when staff change. Europeana and other large cultural data spaces are currently useful mainly at the later stage of preparing restitution cases; the challenge is to integrate them into the “one minute” decision workflow. The Ministry mainly uses professional tracking tools for monitoring, but it also experiments with low-cost or free copyright-tracking solutions, focusing on low false-positive rates and user-friendly interfaces.

The speaker distinguished between background noise false positives, which are overwhelming but easy to discard, and rarer “insidious” false positives caused by copies, retouching or digital imposters, which consume more time but have been reduced to an estimated under ten percent. Increased traffic from Ukraine was noted; effective monitoring requires prior documentation or data-sharing from partners. M. Wisniewski stressed that good technology for this work must be reliable, fast, accessible to non-specialists, interoperable with legal processes and designed with end-user needs in mind, and that feedback loops with developers are essential to keep tools agile and useful. Here is the recording