Looted cultural heritage ought to be restituted

Canterbury Auction Galleries in the United Kingdom has turned a deaf ear to the State Administration of Cultural Heritage's urging that it cancel the auction of a rare Chinese bronze water vessel looted by a British soldier from Beijing's Old Summer Palace in 1860.

It may think it has done nothing wrong in proceeding to auction the item on Wednesday.

It is true, as the British auction house reportedly argued, that there is no law in the United Kingdom preventing it from doing so, and that a UNESCO convention, adopted in 1970, to prohibit the illicit import, export and transfer of cultural relics, to which the UK became a party in 2002, is not retroactive.