Statistics on European Art Crime

by Dr. Ludo Block, Senior Investigator at Grant Thornton Forensic & Investigation Services Netherlands

When Poland held the European Union (EU) Presidency in the second half of 2011, Art Crime formed one of their priorities in the field of police cooperation. Among other things, this resulted in Council Conclusions on preventing and combating crime against cultural goods, which were adopted by the EU Council on 13 December 2011.

The Polish Presidency coordinated efforts in the Law Enforcement Working Group of the EU Council to collect statistics on Art Crime and the law enforcement responses on Art Crime in different EU member states. The table below shows some of the data collected, i.e. the number of offences between 2007 and 2010 as recorded in 20 of the 27 EU member states. The exact definitions of 'Art Crime offences'  of course differ between the EU member states, but the data does give some insight in the trends. Additionally, these data have not been previously collected and published together.

Number of Art Crime offences 2007-2010 in 20 European Union Member States:

Year EU Member State	2007	2008	2009	2010
Austria	131	125	113	missing data
Belgium	229	223	252	175
Bulgaria	206	164	204	191
Cyprus	8	7	10	14
Czech Republic	370	639	1527	954
Denmark	57	62	50	82
Estonia	8	9	8	7
France	2714	2223	1751	1442
Greece	75	87	72	91
Spain	443	432	489	543
Netherlands	missing data	missing data	missing data	831
Lithuania	15	13	14	12
Latvia	46 (171 items stolen)	94 (222 items stolen)	79 (204 items stolen)	100 (318 items stolen)
Malta	9	8	9	6
Germany	2003	2265	2055	missing data
Poland	1132	776	814	804
Portugal	164	233	200	159
Slovakia	24	25	26	29
Slovenia	28	55	42	66
Italy	1085	1031	882	817
TOTAL	8747	8471	8597	6323