On 13 April 2026, France’s National Assembly unanimously passed a landmark bill to streamline the restitution of cultural artefacts looted during the colonial era. One example is the sword of El Hadj Omar Tall, which Senegal has formally sought to have returned from France. Coming after the Senate’s unanimous adoption in January, the legislation will soon become law. Britain, whose museums hold some of the most contested objects on earth, should take note.

The French bill targets property acquired between 1815 and 1972, spanning the broad sweep of French imperial expansion. Previously, every individual restitution required a separate act of parliament, a cumbersome process that made return almost impossible at scale. The new framework creates two expert committees to assess requests: one including scientific experts and representatives from the requesting state, and another drawing on museum, government, and legislative personnel. If the committees recommend return, the government may approve restitution without fresh parliamentary legislation. This is, as one senator put it, “a stable framework, which will allow for real progress going forward”: not a revolution, but a workable process.

The legislation fulfils a pledge President Macron first made in Ouagadougou in 2017, when he promised France would “never again interfere in its former colonies.” It builds on earlier steps: in 2023, framework laws enabled the return of artworks looted from Jewish families and the repatriation of human remains, establishing a legislative template. In 2025, France returned a colonial-era “talking drum” to the Ivory Coast. Algeria, Mali and Benin have all submitted restitution requests that are set to benefit from the streamlined process. This is cultural diplomacy with substantive legal architecture behind it.

Britain’s situation is structurally similar, yet legally frozen. The British Museum Act 1963 prohibits the Museum’s trustees from permanently deaccessioning objects from its collection except in highly limited circumstances. This is the legal barrier blocking the return of the Parthenon Sculptures to Greece, the Benin Bronzes, and hundreds of other contested objects.

The Charities Act 2022 may allow museums to return objects where they feel a clear moral duty to do so; however, the exact impact of this law remains uncertain. Prime Minister Starmer has stated his government “has no plans to change the law” on the Parthenon Sculptures, a position that is increasingly hard to defend internationally.

The human rights argument for reform is compelling. Cultural heritage is not merely aesthetic; it is constitutive of identity, memory, and dignity. International instruments, including UNESCO’s 1970 Convention on illicit cultural property and UNDRIP’s protections for Indigenous cultural rights, ground restitution claims in international law. Britain’s refusal to engage legislatively does not merely maintain the status quo; it perpetuates the original wrong.

France’s new law is imperfect, and its political compromises are visible on its face. Most strikingly, it does not use the word ‘colonialism’, a deliberate omission to placate the far-right National Rally, which wants restitutions limited to states with “cordial” diplomatic relations with France. This political bargain risks inconsistent application: states currently governed by military juntas such as [example], several of which are former French colonies in West Africa, could be excluded by this condition. The far-left party, ‘La France Insoumise’, argued the scope was too narrow. Both critiques reveal a central tension: the law is framed as administrative modernisation rather than an act of moral reckoning with colonialism.

But imperfect legislation that enables restitution is better than elegant inaction. Britain should legislate: not simply to amend the British Museum Act, but to establish a positive, accessible framework for restitution claims modelled on what France has now achieved. If the argument is that Britain’s colonial past is too vast to address by law, France, which also held a large colonial empire, has just demonstrated otherwise.