Legal Challenges of Protecting Underwater Cultural Heritage in the Light of Salvage Law and Law of Finds

Salvors and finders seek to maximize the economic benefits of their actions while archaeologists seek to provide optimal conditions for the protection of underwater cultural heritage. The contradiction between the goals of these two groups is obvious and reconciling their conflicting goals is very difficult. National laws and international documents have taken two general approaches to this challenge: some of them completely prohibit the application of salvage law and the law of finds to underwater archaeological and historical remains, and others explicitly authorize the implementation of these laws in the field of underwater cultural heritage. In the meantime, The UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage (2001) has tried to create a compromise between the conflicting positions of these two approaches. Article 4 of this Convention provides for the implementation of salvage law and law of finds subject to certain conditions. The compatibility of this provision with Article 303(3) of the 1982 Convention is ambiguous and its compatibility with the provisions of the International Convention on Salvage (1989) is possible under certain conditions.