On Monday, June 2, 2014 members of the Antiquities Coalition joined together with fellow advocates to attend a hearing and show support for a Memorandum of Understand (MoU) between the State Department Cultural Property Advisory Committee (CPAC) and the government of Egypt. The MoU would allow CPAC and State to place import restrictions on incoming antiquities from Egypt to help curb the rampant artifact looting and cultural racketeering that has taken place since the Arab Spring. The CPAC has several such bilateral agreements with over a dozen countries.
Testimonies in favor of the MoU included:
David O’Connor (American Research Center in Egypt); Laurel Bestock (Brown University); Douglas Boin (Saint Louis University); Elizabeth Varner (Lawyer’s Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation); Carmen Arnold-Biucchi (Harvard University); Monica Hanna (Egyptologist and activist); Sarah Parcak (University of Alabama at Birmingham and The Antiquities Coalition); and Brian Daniels (Penn Cultural Heritage Center).
