49 Spring 2026 by the former President of the German Federal Constitutional Court Jutta Limbach (and therefore also formerly known as “Limbach Commission”), and since 2017 chaired by the subsequent former President of the German Federal Constitutional Court, Hans-Jürgen Papier. This commission was primarily designed as a mediation body. It could therefore only be called upon if both parties agreed and if the parties had previously tried unsuccessfully to reach a “just and fair solution” in bilateral negotiations, according to a so-called “subsidiarity principle.”13 Beyond mediation, the Advisory Commission could “make recommendations for the settlement of the dispute which can also be justified on moral and ethical grounds.”14 In practice, the focus was on such non-binding recommendations. This dispute resolution model had recently fallen into a crisis.15 IV. Crises with the Previous Dispute Resolution Model The fact that a claimant could only undertake mediation proceedings before the Advisory Commission with the consent of the other party resulted in refusals and deadlocks in difficult cases, and in many instances resulted in negotiations lasting years. It was therefore a central goal of all reform considerations to strengthen the position of the claimants in this respect and to grant access to a remedy unilaterally.16 In addition, this model had led to the majority of restitution decisions in Germany being negotiated bilaterally between the claimant and the responding museum. The public was usually only informed by press releases, which were often very short and did not precisely reflect the grounds for restitution, rejection or other intermediate forms of just and fair solutions, nor did they intend to. Tens of thousands of such settlements have been reached in the 25 years since the Washington Principles were adopted.17 These numbers are certainly a substantial success, given that the underlying normative instruments were all non-binding and operating on rather vague moral pleas. However, some of the decisions turned out to be highly controversial, some produced questionable results; others involved questionable or at least volatile reasoning (if communicated at all). Some decisions were kept entirely confidential, sometimes at the request of the claimant, sometimes by the current holder. It is self-evident that these structures did not contribute optimally to support the legitimacy of the process. Nor was it possible to reply meaningfully to the question to what extent Germany as a country, including its federal states and municipalities, was living up to its historical responsibility, since precise centralized statistics were unavailable,18 and annual reports compiling the resolved cases were only provided for by some large museums, if at all, but never nationwide. Furthermore, the decentralized structure of this model meant that each of the approximately 7,000 public museums and cultural institutions essentially had to develop its own style of negotiation and decision-making. Some of these current holders — usually large units with their own specialized legal department — were able to establish a consistent and convincing practice. However, many others were less successful in the few individual cases that concerned them, and overall, the decision-making parameters — often handled by art historians or legal generalists — remained rather blurred and volatile, and sometimes implausible in their internal logic. In addition, the decisions developed by the expert level of the current holders were subject to the final assessment of the political bodies or officials of the respective museum, e.g., a mayor or the local city parliament. This placed the decisions at risk of media intervention and distortion by political intervention, be it in favor of the claimant or of the current holder. From the outset, as explained above, the German Federal Government’s “Orientierungshilfe” (“Guidelines”) never claimed to achieve an “official” standardization of parameters and policies for just and fair solutions, but rather 13. Rules of Procedure Advisory Commission, § 3, ¶ 2, (2016). 14. Rules of Procedure Advisory Commission, § 1, ¶ 6, (2016). 15. Comprehensive analysis by Weller et al., supra note 7, at 224, 240, ¶ 97 et seq. This study was commissioned by the German Federal Commissioner for Culture and Media to explore options for reform and was conducted by an international group of academic experts. 16. See also Washington Principles, supra note 2, at No. 7. 17. An estimated 10,000 objects from museum collections and nearly 35,000 objects from libraries and archives; see German Lost Art Foundation (Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste) (Nov. 14, 2025), available at https://kulturgutverluste. de/restitutionsmeldung 18. Ibid. These notifications took place on a voluntary basis and thus probably remained incomplete.
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