The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict is the first international treaty that focuses exclusively on the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. It was signed at The Hague, Netherlands, on 14 May 1954 and entered into force on 7 August 1956. As of June 2025, it has been ratified by 138 States.
The provisions of the 1954 Hague Convention were supplemented and clarified by two Protocols concluded in 1954 and 1999. All three agreements are part of International Humanitarian Law, which, in the form of further agreements, primarily includes provisions defining the permissible means and methods of warfare and aiming at the widest possible protection of persons not involved in the fighting. In contrast to these parts of International Humanitarian Law, the agreements on the protection of cultural property were drawn up under the auspices of the United Nations (UN); the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is primarily responsible for the dissemination and monitoring of compliance. In addition to rules designed to ensure the protection and respect of cultural property during an armed conflict, these agreements also provide for security measures to be implemented in times of peace.
Blue Shield International, based in The Hague, is active in the field of international coordination with regard to military and civil structures for the protection of cultural assets.
The guiding principles of the convention and the motivation for its conclusion, dissemination and respect are summarised in the preamble, which states, among other things:
States Parties
As of August 2026, 138 States are Parties to the treaty and there are 115 States Parties to the First Protocol, while the Second Protocol has 94 States Parties.
Cultural property
For the purposes of the present Convention, the term 'cultural property' shall cover, irrespective of origin or ownership:
(a) movable or immovable property of great importance to the cultural heritage of every people, such as monuments of architecture, art or history, whether religious or secular; archaeological sites; groups of buildings which, as a whole, are of historical or artistic interest; works of art; manuscripts, books and other objects of artistic, historical or archaeological interest; as well as scientific collections and important collections of books or archives or of reproductions of the property defined above;
(b) buildings whose main and effective purpose is to preserve or exhibit the movable cultural property defined in sub-paragraph (a) such as museums, large libraries and depositories of archives, and refuges intended to shelter, in the event of armed conflict, the movable cultural property defined in sub-paragraph (a);
(c) centers containing a large amount of cultural property as defined in sub-paragraphs (a) and (b), to be known as 'centers containing monuments'.
Cultural property is the manifestation and expression of the cultural heritage of a group of people or a society. It is an expression of the ways of living developed by a community and passed on from generation to generation, including the customs of a people, their practices, places, objects, artistic endeavours and values. The protection of cultural property during times of armed conflict or occupation is of great importance, because such property reflects the life, history and identity of communities; its preservation helps to rebuild communities, re-establish identities, and link people's past with their present and future.
History
Preceding conventions
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 preceded the Hague Convention of 1954. The multilateral agreement of 1899 and the slightly amended later version of 1907 contained in Article 27 the commandment for the attacking party to spare historical monuments, educational institutions and institutions of religious, not-for-profit, artistic or scientific significance as far as possible during sieges and bombardments. The party under attack is called upon to mark appropriate buildings. Article 56 also contained a general ban on the confiscation, destruction or damage of such facilities. However, during the First World War, acceptance of these first Hague Conventions was severely restricted by the so-called all-participation clause. It stated that, in the event of war or armed conflict, this Agreement should apply only if all States involved in that conflict are parties to the convention.
The Russian lawyer, painter and writer Nicholas Roerich, who witnessed the destruction of cultural assets in Russia during the First World War and the October Revolution, initiated the development of an independent treaty at the beginning of the 1930s to protect cultural assets during armed conflicts. On his initiative, Georges Chklaver of the Institute for Higher International Studies at the University of Paris drew up a corresponding draft in 1929. This proposal was subsequently discussed by the International Museum Office of the League of Nations and at private conferences in Bruges in 1931 and 1932 and in Washington, D.C. in 1933. The seventh international conference of American states, which took place in Buenos Aires in 1933, recommended the adoption of the draft. The Board of the Pan-American Union subsequently presented a treaty "on the protection of artistic and scientific institutions and historical monuments", which was signed on 15 April 1935 in the White House by 21 states in North, Central and South America. Ten of the signatory states also became parties by ratification, the first of which was the United States on 13 July 1935 and the last of which was Colombia on 20 February 1937. The agreement, also known as the Roerich Pact after its initiator, entered into force on 26 August 1935.
The Roerich Pact contained eight articles and several significant innovations compared with the general provisions of Articles 27 and 56 of the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907. On the one hand, the treaty established the status of neutrality for historical monuments, museums, scientific and artistic institutions as well as educational and cultural institutions. This legal position, comparable to the neutrality of medical personnel and comparable institutions during a war, resulted in respect for these goods by all parties involved in a conflict and thus their protection. The Parties should send lists of monuments and sites for which they claimed protection under the Treaty to the Pan-American Union, which should forward them to all States Parties.
In addition, the Treaty defined a protection mark for the marking of cultural objects, consisting of three red dots in a red circle on a white background. Nicholas Roerich, who designed it with early symbolism in mind, described the significance of the three points as a symbol of art, science and religion as the three most important cultural activities of humanity, with the circle as the element that linked these three aspects in the past, present and future. The symbol was also called the "Banner of Peace", the movement based on the Roerich Pact under the name Pax Cultura in analogy to the Geneva Conventions as the "Red Cross of Culture".
However, the acceptance of the Roerich Pact was limited to the United States and the countries of Central and South America. Not a single country in Europe and Asia, the geopolitical focus of the Second World War that began a few years later, signed or ratified the treaty. Even though it remains valid in relations between the parties and the Organization of American States (OAS) and continues to act as a depositary in succession to the Pan-American Union, the Roerich Pact remained without significant practical relevance. As the USA is not party to the 1999 Second Protocol of the Hague Convention, the Roerich Pact is therefore still of importance as a contractual obligation in the area of cultural property protection. Nevertheless, with the establishment of a protective label and the administration of lists of cultural assets worthy of protection by a central international institution, this treaty introduced two important far-reaching principles in the area of the protection of cultural assets in armed conflicts that remain important today.
Only four years after the Roerich Pact was signed, the government of the Netherlands presented a draft for a new convention, in the drafting of which the International Museum Office of the League of Nations was also significantly involved. However, the start of the Second World War in the same year prevented all further steps to develop and implement this proposal. After the end of the war, in 1948 the Netherlands again submitted a proposal to UNESCO, which had been founded three years earlier. In 1951, the General Conference of UNESCO decided to set up a committee of governmental experts to draft a new convention. A year later, this committee submitted a draft to the General Conference, which forwarded it to the national governments for further discussion. From 21 April to 14 May 1954, an international conference was held in The Hague with the participation of 56 states, which drew up a final version and adopted it as the "Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict". The agreement entered into force on 7 August 1956. After the 1948 Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, this was the second important agreement in the field of international humanitarian law to which the United Nations played a major role in its creation and implementation.
Destruction of cultural property in World War II
The Nazis and "degenerate art"
The Nazi Party headed by Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933 after the country's crippling defeat, and its socioeconomic distress during the years following World War I. World War II was aimed at reclaiming the glory of the once great Germanic state. Cultural property of many European nations and significant ethnic and social groups within them fell victim to Nazi Germany. The Nazi party, through the Third Reich, confiscated close to 20% of all Western European art during the war. By the end of the Second World War, the Nazi party had looted and collected thousands of objects, art works and artefacts from occupied nations, destroyed many, or stored them in secret.
With artists depicting the hardship of the German people after World War I, and further expressing the fear of anti-Semitism and fascism, the Nazi party and Hitler himself soon realised the dangerous power of art, and began to clamp down on artistic production and forcing both artists and the public alike to adhere to a Nazi-approved style.
Inherent within the Nazi's ideology was the idea of supremacy of the Aryan Race and all that it produced; as such the Nazi campaign's aims were to neutralize non-Germanic cultures and this was done through the destruction of culturally significant art and artefacts. This is illustrated greatest in the Jewish communities throughout Europe; by devising a series of laws that allowed them to justify and regulate the legal confiscation of cultural and personal property. Within Germany the looting of German Jewish cultural property began with the confiscation of non-Germanic artwork in the German state collection. Further, artists that were Jewish and artworks that did not match the Nazi ideology, or posed a threat to it, were stamped as degenerate art. Degenerate works of art, culminating in the infamous exhibition with the same name, were those whose subject, artist, or art was either Jewish or expressed Anti-Nazi sentiments, and was as such offensive to the Third Reich.
Jewish collections were looted the most throughout the war. German Jews were ordered to report their personal assets, which were then privatized by the country. Jewish owned art galleries were forced to sell the works of art they housed. The Nazis concentrated their efforts on ensuring that all art within Germany would be Aryan in nature, speaking to the might of the Germanic state rather than Jewish art which was deemed as a blight on society. In a feat to "purge" German museums and collections, confiscation committees seized approximately 16,000 items within Germany. The remaining unexploited art was destroyed in massive bonfires. As the war progressed, the Nazi party elite ordered the confiscation of cultural property throughout various European countries.
Nazi plunder in Eastern Europe
In the Soviet Union, Nazi plunder of cultural significant art is best illustrated in the Third Reich's pillage of the Catherine Palace near St Petersburg and its famous Amber Room dating to the early 1700s. In October 1941, the Nazis had occupied the western portion of the Soviet Union, and began removing art treasures to the west. The entirety of the Amber Room was removed to Königsberg and reconstructed there. In January 1945, with the Russian army advancing on the city, the Amber Room was ordered to be moved again but its fate is thereafter unclear. A post-war Russian report concluded that 'summarizing all the facts, we can say that the Amber Room was destroyed between 9 and 11 April 1945' during the battle to take the city. However, in the absence of definitive proof, other theories about its fate continue to be entertained to the present day. With financial assistance from German donors, Russian craftsmen reconstructed a new Amber Room during the 1990s. The new room was dedicated by Russian president Vladimir Putin and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder at the 300th anniversary of the city of Saint Petersburg.