Digital Heritage Summit 2026 - Discussing fight against trafficking

A day built around diagnosis, advocacy and next steps

In the framework of the Digital Heritage Summit in Limassol, the École française d'Athènes and the Michael Culture Association organised a one-day event to discuss the illicit trafficking of cultural property in Europe in connection with the ANCHISE project. The meeting was chaired by Prof. Véronique Chankowski, director of the École française d'Athènes and ANCHISE coordinator, and Prof. Marinos Ioannides, director of the UNESCO Chair on Digital Cultural Heritage at the Cyprus University of Technology, who hosted the day.

The event brought together experts in the field, including representatives from the three Horizon Europe "Cluster 2" projects working on this topic — ANCHISE, ENIGMA and AURORA — with the explicit purpose of moving from diagnosis to a concrete proposal: a European interdisciplinary competence centre dedicated to fighting illicit trafficking of cultural heritage.

The day was organised in three acts: a diagnosis session on the current state of trafficking and the tools developed so far, an advocacy session gathering support from institutions and infrastructures, and a closing round table on how such a centre could actually be set up. The morning's keynote came from Eleanor E. Fink, the early architect of the Object ID standard, who traced its origins back to a 1990s effort to get police, museums and international organisations to share basic descriptive data on stolen objects. This effort, as she noted, is still hampered today by the absence of interoperability across the many databases now in use.

Three outcomes from the discussions

The first outcome concerns data for enhancing the fight against trafficking and looting. Speakers agreed that the problem is less a lack of data than a lack of shared, trusted infrastructure to use it. As Valentina Vassallo from the Cyprus Institute put it, "the challenge today is not the absence of data [...], but the absence of standardised, secure channels to share it across institutions and borders". Tools such as GUARDIAN-CH, built under ANCHISE, and the metadata work carried out under ENIGMA were presented as steps toward this interoperability, alongside the European Data Space for Cultural Heritage and the emerging European Collaborative Cloud for Cultural Heritage.

The second outcome is the call for a holistic, European-level response rather than a patchwork of national or project-based initiatives. Speaking on behalf of Europa Nostra, Sneška Quaedvlieg-Mihailović stressed that "illicit trafficking of cultural heritage is not simply a heritage issue, but a social, economic and criminal phenomenon that requires cooperation across law enforcement, heritage institutions, researchers, technology developers and civil society [...]". This point echoed remarks made throughout the day about legal fragmentation, including the low ratification rate of the Nicosia Convention, and about the difficulty of turning years of Horizon Europe funding into lasting infrastructure once individual projects end.

The third outcome concerned the practical shape of a future competence centre. Marco Fiore from Michael Culture Association summarised a set of proposed functions: an observatory to track the phenomenon, a research and incubation function to bring tools to operational use, community engagement across the sector's different professional groups, training and capacity building, alert mechanisms for the public, and crisis-response coordination. Efthymios Shaftacolas from the Cyprus Department of Antiquities, Marie-Véronique LeRoi from the French Ministry of Culture, and UNESCO Chair  Prof. Marinos Ioannides broadly supported the idea, while noting that its success depends on sustainable funding, a feasibility study, and genuine coordination that surpasses the creation of another administrative layer.

Raising awareness

Several speakers returned to the question of public awareness, arguing that a competence centre cannot function on technical excellence alone. Noah Charney, founder of ARCA, argued that communication and awareness needs to be built into any such structure from the outset, as an integral part of the projects in the domain. He summed up the underlying idea in one line: "The public enters this through story." His point was that public and political attention to trafficking cases can help sustain long-term institutional support, provided it is handled responsibly rather than turned into entertainment.

What this means for EU policy going forward

The event did not produce a finished blueprint, but it did bring the recommendations of ANCHISE, ENIGMA and AURORA together into a shared position: that a European interdisciplinary competence centre should be pursued, most likely first through a Coordination and Support Action under Horizon Europe, with a view to a more permanent structure to be discussed in the next Multiannual Financial Framework. Speakers repeatedly pointed to specific near-term steps, ratification of the Nicosia Convention, digitisation targets already set by the European Commission for 2030, and closer links between the Data Space, the Collaborative Cloud and law enforcement databases, as the concrete building blocks such a centre would need to connect rather than replace.

Watch the recording here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8-i6rzyQw0