A Growing Coalition to Leverage UNCAC in the Fight Against Corruption and Cultural Racketeering
December 17, 2025
On the margins of the world’s foremost anti-corruption forum, governments and experts advance coordinated action to protect cultural heritage.
December 17, 2025 – Doha, Qatar — On the margins of the 11th Conference of States Parties (CoSP) to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), a growing international coalition convened to accelerate coordinated action against cultural racketeering—a form of crime increasingly recognized as an enabler of corruption, terrorist financing, and national security threats.
Representatives from the Antiquities Coalition, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), the Arab Republic of Egypt, the Italian Republic, and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime met to examine how UNCAC’s existing tools can be more consistently and effectively applied to crimes involving looted and trafficked cultural heritage.
Each UNCAC CoSP has grown the coalition confronting cultural racketeering—and sharpened its focus. This year’s Antiquities Coalition side event, “Leveraging the UNCAC to Combat Cultural Racketeering,” reflected that evolution, bringing together a broader range of states and practitioners prepared to move beyond conceptual discourse toward tactical implementation. With cultural heritage crime now firmly embedded within global anti-corruption discussions, participants emphasized multilateral cooperation, practical application of the treaty’s provisions, and the importance of formal mechanisms to sustain progress.
Delegates from the Republic of Italy and the Arab Republic of Egypt demonstrated how their countries have successfully leveraged UNCAC to pursue accountability and justice in cases involving crimes against nationally significant cultural heritage. The UK DCMS highlighted the impact of UNCAC-guided international coordination and training initiatives, and called for continued leadership to strengthen adherence to the treaty.
Speaking on behalf of UNODC, Murat Yildiz, Trafficking in Cultural Property Lead for the Global Programme on Criminal Network Disruption, underscored that UNCAC provides practical tools to disrupt cultural racketeering networks, identifying systematic application as the essential next step.
Antiquities Coalition Executive Director Tess Davis concluded her remarks highlighting a few aspects of the UNCAC that make it a powerful framework to combat cultural racketeering.
- Broad scope: UNCAC reaches far beyond cultural heritage law, enabling action against the full ecosystem of cultural racketeering—including corruption, forgery and fraud networks, money laundering, sanctions evasion, asset concealment, and the misuse of offshore jurisdictions and shell companies.
- Stronger obligations: UNCAC imposes clear, binding duties on States Parties through mandatory “shall” language, in contrast to the more discretionary standards common in cultural heritage conventions.
- Wider participation: As one of the most widely ratified UN instruments, UNCAC brings in States not party to key cultural heritage treaties, expanding jurisdictional reach and cooperation.
- Criminalization: UNCAC directly criminalizes underlying conduct, complementing UNESCO and UNIDROIT conventions, which focus on norms rather than enforcement
- Robust asset recovery: UNCAC places asset recovery at the heart of the treaty, mandating extensive international cooperation and return of stolen property through State-to-State processes.
Now is the time, participants concluded, for sustained momentum to translate into concrete outcomes, beginning with targeted implementation of the convention and the development of a dedicated resolution reflecting the scale, seriousness, and global impact of cultural racketeering.
Read the UN Convention Against Corruption, here.
Revisit outcomes from the 10th CoSP, Adding Cultural Racketeering to the Campaign Against Corruption.