According to a number of publications, on June 9 the Supreme Court of the Netherlands finally ruled that the “Scythian gold”, which had been the subject of legal battle in the Netherlands for years, should be returned to Ukraine.
The Supreme Court confirmed the decision previously made by the Amsterdam Court of Appeal in October 2021 on the need to return gold to Ukraine and rejected the cassation complaint of the “Crimean museums”.
Recall that earlier both the Kremlin and the Crimean collaborators, realizing the futility of the fake “cassation”, frantically searched for “extreme” in this situation, which was frankly tragicomic in nature.
Now we should expect another “criminal case” from the aggressor, both regarding the Crimean “switchmen”, and as part of criminal prosecutions against Dutch judges.
As Alexander Malyshev, a member of the Board of the Ukrainian Association of Archaeologists, pointed out about this decision of the Netherlands, the Supreme Court divided the case of the collection from Tauric Chersonesos and the collections of other Crimean museums. In the first case, Ukraine is the founder of the museum, and here the court stated that Ukraine did not violate the legislative guarantees of the right of operational management, since the order to return the exhibition to Kyiv, and not to Crimea, is considered as an emergency temporary measure.
As for the other three museums, the expert points out that the aggressor defended the “position” that the collections are not the property of Ukraine, but of the AR of Crimea, according to which the Supreme Court indicated that property relations are a private right, over which the public right to protect cultural heritage has priority, and even if collections are the property of the AR of Crimea, as a Ukrainian entity, more importantly, the law refers them to the cultural heritage of Ukraine and to the state part of the Museum Fund of Ukraine.
