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In-person attendees at CHCC meeting on April 12, 2022. This was the committee’s first hybrid meeting.
On April 12, 2022, the Assistant Secretary of State for Educational and Cultural Affairs, Lee Satterfield, convened the 16 member agencies of the Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee (CHCC). In this first CHCC meeting under her leadership, the Committee focused on coordinating U.S. government efforts to protect Ukrainian cultural heritage in the face of Russia’s unwarranted, unprovoked, and unjust war.
Committee members reviewed the findings of the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab (CHML), which is documenting how Russia’s war is affecting Ukraine’s cultural heritage, with the support of the Department of State and the Smithsonian Institution. Using satellite imagery and other technical expertise, the CHML is documenting Ukraine’s tens of thousands of cultural heritage sites and monitoring their status during Russia’s brutal assault. This work is an important contribution to fully assessing the condition of Ukraine’s cultural heritage and demanding accountability for actions to harm or destroy that heritage. Committee members discussed additional resources and technologies they could offer to improve the accuracy and efficiency of CHML’s findings. CHML’s most recent report is publicly available.
Turning to domestic law enforcement, the Committee also discussed the ongoing positive results of the Cultural Property Experts on Call Program. Through a partnership between the State Department and the University of Pennsylvania, the program connects U.S. law enforcement officials with experts in archaeology and art history to facilitate the identification of cultural property in the course of law enforcement investigations. Since the program’s founding in 2020, the on-call experts have accurately identified 98% of objects referred to them by agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Since 2007, HSI has repatriated more than 15,000 objects to over 40 countries and institutions and the FBI Art Crime Team has recovered more than 15,000 items valued at over $800 million.
The U.S. Department of State established the Cultural Heritage Coordinating Committee in 2016 to coordinate U.S. government efforts to protect and preserve cultural property internationally when it is at risk from political instability, armed conflict, or natural or other disasters.
