Titanic, before its doomed voyage. Photo credit: Aidan McMichael http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmcmichael/5153563359/
Much has been made over the Easter weekend by UNESCO of the fact that the wreck of R.M.S. Titanic will, from its 100th anniversary this week, be covered by the UN Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. This Convention, signed amid a fanfare in Paris on 2 November 2001, applies to underwater remains when they have been submerged for at least 100 years.
But is this rite of passage really as crucial as has been made out?
As Titanic’s wreck, lying more than two miles below the surface of the North Atlantic, turns 100 on 15 April, the focus has turned to efforts to preserve the memory of the ship and its artefacts for the future. In essence, the debate is now about cultural heritage.
In that regard, Belfast has just seen the opening of its new exhibition and museum, Titanic Belfast, which aims to anchor global collective memory of the wreck to the Harland and Wolff shipyard where she was built. This activity has all taken place against a rather bleak prognosis for the future of the wreck itself, the decline of which is thought to be happening faster than thought in the mid-1980s.
Behind the historical questions, however, there lie, as always, legal questions. And in the case of a wreck such as Titanic, the legal web which surrounds the wreck site is complex.
Titanic was a ship built in the UK (Belfast) by a UK company that was part of a US conglomerate, a ship which was registered in Liverpool but which sailed from Southampton, but which also docked in France and Ireland, and which sank two and a half miles under the Atlantic, 375 miles off Newfoundland in international waters.
The Director General of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, commented on the BBC recently that the sinking of the Titanic was “anchored in the memory of humanity”. Highlighting the plight of thousands of other shipwrecks she argued that “we do not tolerate the plundering of cultural sites on land, and the same should be true for our sunken heritage.” Bokova also called on divers not to dump equipment or commemorative plaques on the Titanic site.
Bokova has said nothing from which I would dissent and she is certainly right to highlight the plight of underwater cultural heritage.
The 2001 Convention is, potentially, a very significant tool with which to safeguard wreck sites such as Titanic. It prevents commercial exploitation, provides that, where possible, wreck sites should be preserved where they lie on the sea floor (in situ) and provides a comprehensive, best practice-based regime for the care and curation of any artefacts. The Convention also requires states to promote public display and to encourage archaeological research. It does not, however, set out to determine who, or what, owns the wreck.
So far, so good.
But the 2001 Convention only bites on the states which have ratified it and, to date, relatively few states (41) have actually ratified the 2001 Convention, which came into force on 2 January 2009. Crucially, it hasn’t been ratified by the US, the UK, Canada or France. These are the states with the biggest interest in the remains of the wreck and its artefacts. Most of the artefacts which have been taken from the wreck site have been lifted by US or French dives.
The legal web gets even thicker. The US, UK, Canada and France entered, in 2003, a free-standing agreement (“the International Agreement Concerning the Shipwrecked Vessel RMS Titanic”) which has the same aims, in principle, as the UN Convention. This, however, is not yet in force. Canada and France did not ratify it and the US Congress has not yet provided the necessary legislation for the US ratification to take effect but progress may be on the way, since moves have been made this month by Massachusetts Senator John Kerry to close this gap.
The upshot of this is that the international protection for the wreck site is, at best, inconsistent.
It is also of note that the world’s focus has largely shifted from the wreck itself to its artefacts. Over 5,000 artefacts have been recovered from the wreck site which have been the subject of more than 12 years of legal wrangling in Virginia, in the US. The case came to a predictable conclusion in 2010 in which a US company, RMS Titanic, Inc., was granted ownership of the artefacts, worth an estimated $189 million. Following that case, however, the Court put in place some very strict conditions which require the artefact collection to be retained intact and which require them to be displayed to the global public. These artefacts will be the subject of an auction in Manhattan next week and the outcome of this auction will be very interesting indeed.
Only time will tell whether the courts can succeed where, at present, UNESCO cannot.
We must not forget that Titanic is unique and we should be wary of drawing too many lessons from her story. While the present ardour for all things Titanic will abate in time, interest in the wreck’s story will probably never die. UNESCO does not, however, provide the full solution either for Titanic or for other shipwrecks. The real test for UNESCO, for salvage companies and for lawyers will be the preservation of other wrecks – perhaps not yet discovered – which don’t benefit from Titanic’s infamy.
