The Boston Globe had an article on the emerging trend of museums returning antiques to the country of origin.

These returned objects are only the most visible recent fruits of a powerful movement aimed at moving some of the world’s most prominent ancient treasures from the hands of foreign museums and collectors back to the so-called source countries. Along with Italy, the governments of Greece, Guatemala, El Salvador, Peru, Turkey, China, and Cambodia, among others, have pushed to reclaim prized artifacts from collections around the world.

They have tightened their laws governing the export of antiquities or intensified the enforcement of existing laws and international agreements; they have made impassioned public cases on the world stage.

These governments argue that to allow such objects to remain abroad as trophies only encourages the continued pillage of their national patrimony. Their position has won broad moral support and increasingly become the norm among academic archeologists, who see ancient objects as historic artifacts inseparable from their place of discovery. It has forced major concessions from great museums around the world, including the MFA, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The British Museum is under persistent pressure to return the Elgin Marbles, its famous set of sculptures from the Parthenon.

Art and Antique smuggling industry is valued at $10 billion.