The debate came after the report with 14 recomendations of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Afrikan-Reparations (APPG-AR) (made up of parliamentarians, campaigners and community members) calling for a ban on the sale and display of ancestral remains, including Egyptian mummies.
The Human Tissue Act 2004 also only prohibits people from buying, selling and possessing body parts for transplantation.
The report, titled “Laying Ancestors to Rest,” outlined the distress caused to diaspora communities by British institutions holding ancestral remains, many of which were taken during colonial rule.
“The mummified person has historically been traded among the upper classes of Britain and France as a luxurious commodity, also featuring as entertainment in British ‘mummy unwrapping parties’ in the 19th century,” the report said.
Junior minister Fiona Twycross: incomplete databases and collections make it hard to know where human remains are being kept but the recommendations put forward in the report “will inform the government’s consideration” of the issues.
Twycross said ministers regularly meet with museums and that she would ensure that this was raised as an issue.
Controversy surrounding the display and auction of human remains persists globally.
- October 2024, Swan auction house in Oxfordshire, England, withdrew more than two dozen ancestral remains, including shrunken heads and ancestral skulls, from sale after an outcry in the UK and India.
- 2023, the head of the Smithsonian Institution in the United States apologized for amassing a collection of tens of thousands of body parts, largely taken from Black and Indigenous people.
- 2023, London’s Hunterian Museum stopped exhibiting the skeleton of an 18th-century man known as the “Irish Giant,” who grew to be 7 feet, 7 inches tall and wanted to be buried at sea to prevent his body being seized by anatomists.
- 2020, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, England removed 120 human remains from its displays, including an Egyptian mummified child, Naga trophy heads and shrunken heads, as part of a “decolonization process.”
