Every June and December, INTERPOL, the International Criminal Police Organization publishes a poster which highlights key works of art that the law enforcement organization designates as important stolen works of art taken in incidences which have been reported during the previous six months. 

Distributed via all INTERPOL NCBs (National Central Bureaus) biannually to law enforcement agencies worldwide and available to the interested public on the INTERPOL website, their ID tool raises awareness of specific works of art to be watching for.  

NOTE:  This INTERPOL works of art lists are different from the ICOM Red Lists, which list endangered categories of archaeological objects or works of art likely to be trafficked from sixteen (soon to be seventeen) of the most vulnerable areas of the world. 

Since the publication of INTERPOL's first stolen works of art poster in June 1972, the organization has brought attention to 534 stolen objects; 51 of these  objects have been recovered. 

In addition to the biannual posters, INTERPOL sometimes publishes highlight posters designed to draw attention to serious multi-object thefts of substation value that occur at single locations.  

Recent examples of these include: 

The Mosul Museum, Iraq

The Museum of Raqqa, also known as the Ar-Raqqah Museum or Rakka Museum, Syria

The World Heritage Site of Palmyra, Syria 

and the Museo Civico di Castelvecchio, Verona

While Ukrainian border guards recovered 17 of the stolen Old Master paintings worth $18.3 million from the Italian museum, other historical objects in Iraq and Syria are still missing. 

by Catherine Schofield Sezgin,
   ARCA Blog Editor-in-chief

Investigations in the cultural sector are very peculiar and often connected to larger criminal issues. In fact, art crimes are specific in term of legislations, the expedient used to remove or obscure the illegal provenance of a cultural good, and because the persons involved are much the same. Trafficking in cultural goods is also a phenomenon which often involves transnational organized groups, and these sort of offences seems forcing—at least in the most complex cases—a quite new concept of co-management of investigation and prosecution: the so-called prolonged coordination of law enforcements, the only ones able to entirely dismantle a criminal organization.

Paolo Giorgio Ferri is a former Italian State Prosecutor and recipient of the ARCA Award for Art Policing and Recovery.

Subscriptions to The Journal of Art Crime or individual copies of eEditions or printed issues may be obtained through ARCA's website here.