The process of implementation of the EU cultural goods Directive is more complicated than it would seem prima facie. Member States have been given a large degree of freedom in defining their national treasures, ecclesiastical goods, and public collections. This gives the Member States the opportunity of either narrowing these notions to the most treasured cultural goods, or expanding them to cover almost everything that can be classed as a “heritage item”. Both extremes may lead to unexpected and potentially harmful results. Furthermore, it is the job of the Member States to define procedural rules for internal restitution proceedings, and to establish rules of representation for claims brought before foreign courts. Last but not least, there will be the perennial problem of determining the proper law to rule on the validity of ownership transfers of the returned object. The final outcome of the implementation thus depends largely on lawmakers’ ability to predict the future outcome of proposed solutions, but since law is not an exact science, in the end it will be reduced to the old fashioned “lady or the tiger” dilemma. The purpose of this paper is to show possible ways of avoiding the tiger.

The process of implementation of the EU cultural goods Directive is more complicated than it would seem prima facie. Member States have been given a large degree of freedom in defining their national treasures, ecclesiastical goods, and public collections. This gives the Member States the opportunity of either narrowing these notions to the most treasured cultural goods, or expanding them to cover almost everything that can be classed as a “heritage item”. Both extremes may lead to unexpected and potentially harmful results. Furthermore, it is the job of the Member States to define procedural rules for internal restitution proceedings, and to establish rules of representation for claims brought before foreign courts. Last but not least, there will be the perennial problem of determining the proper law to rule on the validity of ownership transfers of the returned object. The final outcome of the implementation thus depends largely on lawmakers’ ability to predict the future outcome of proposed solutions, but since law is not an exact science, in the end it will be reduced to the old fashioned “lady or the tiger” dilemma. The purpose of this paper is to show possible ways of avoiding the tiger.