In January 2022, France’s senate approved a bill to set up a national expert commission that would be consulted on any future non-European restitution cases. The draft bill also proposed a law facilitating the restitution of human remains held in French public collections, and this was adopted last December.
In June 2023, the National Assembly also voted unanimously to adopt a new law that allows public institutions to return Nazi-looted objects in their collections. But no date has yet been fixed for a bill on colonial items, the third part of the senators’ aforementioned proposal, to be debated in the National Assembly. An Ivorian drum will be returned to Cote d’Ivoir — though only under a special “deposit agreement”— as this crucial colonial bill has stalled.
An anonymous French journalist tracking the developments says: “Macron promised to restitute the drum in 2021. But since then, we have been waiting for a law organising such restitutions, which has not yet been submitted to parliament so the drum can only be transferred to the Côte d’Ivoire on the basis of a long-term loan. In other words, France continues to apply a policy of restitutions bit-by-bit, against the backdrop of its diplomatic interests.”
