Survey on legislation of cultural properties in the Netherlands and Germany
Since FY 2007, Japan Center for International Cooperation in Conservation has been collecting and translating foreign laws concerning the protection of cultural properties and has so far published 27 volumes covering 16 Asian and 6 European countries. The project is intended to be Japan’s contribution to international cooperation in the field of cultural heritage protection and provide a reference for reevaluating the system used by Japan to protect its cultural properties. A field survey was conducted in the Netherlands, the target country for the current FY, and in Germany, the target for last FY. The survey was conducted from March 3 to 13, 2023.
Recently, in the Netherlands, there has been a discussion on the need to include heritage protection in land use and environmental preservation planning. A new Environmental Planning Law, integrating the existing related laws, will come into force on January 1, 2024. This law will introduce an environmental permit system for the use of cultural heritage sites with basic provisions for municipal environmental planning and similar purposes. This legislative amendment is constructed on the foundation of various agreements of the Council of Europe, such as the Valletta Treaty of 1992 on archaeological heritage and the Florence Convention of 2000 on landscapes.
On the other hand, in Germany, each of the 16 states have their own laws for protection of monuments. There are also slight differences in the protected objects, and only three states have regulations on cultural landscapes. Schleswig-Holstein, the northern state I visited this time, is one of them, but cultural landscapes are not yet in operation. A similar provision can be found in the Federal Nature Conservation Law. However, the German government has not signed the Florence Convention, which is a topic of great debate within the country.
One of the objectives of the Florence Convention is to recognize landscapes that express the “form” of Europe, woven by diverse histories, cultures, and nature, as a common heritage of the EU member States, and to protect them appropriately. Certainly, landscape protection is deeply linked to global issues such as climate change and sustainability that cannot be resolved by a single country. In future research, I think it will be even more important not only to translate laws, but also to specifically clarify the organic relationship between cultural properties and the comprehensive framework that surrounds them.