We are very pleased to present the first contribution by Marco Mangia, a trainee lawyer currently pursuing an LL.M. in Art Law at the LUISS School of Law. His work focuses on Art Law, Cultural Heritage Law, and Intellectual Property, with a particular interest in the circulation, provenance, authenticity, and protection of cultural assets. Marco is also a Student Member of the Art Lawyers Association. In his article, he examines the limitations of existing legal instruments for the protection of cultural heritage in an era marked by the resurgence of armed conflicts.
On 2 March 2026, an airstrike on Arg Square in central Tehran sent shockwaves — quite literally — through one of the most breathtaking buildings in the world. The blast damaged the mirrored ceilings of the Hall of Mirrors, shattered the historic orsi stained-glass windows, and splintered the ornately carved wooden doors of Golestan Palace — a UNESCO World Heritage Site, a cornerstone of Iranian identity, and one of humanity’s most extraordinary architectural achievements. According to the palace’s director, between 50 and 60 % of its doors and windows were destroyed. The estimated restoration cost? Around $1.7 million. The time needed? 2 years, minimum.
A Palace Born from Persian Grandeur
The situation is even more troubling because UNESCO had reportedly shared the geographical coordinates of the site with the parties concerned — the US, Israel, and Iran — before hostilities began. The legal framework was therefore known, and the protected status of the site could hardly have come as a surprise. Yet the damage occurred.
To understand what was lost — or rather, what is at risk of being lost — it helps to understand what Golestan Palace actually is.
The name means Palace of the Rose Garden, and the complex lives up to it: a sprawling ensemble of 8 palatial structures arranged around reflecting pools and lush gardens, located in the heart of Tehran. Its origins date to the Safavid period in the 16th century, but it was the Qajar dynasty — which moved the capital to Tehran in 1779 — that transformed the complex into the official royal residence, fusing Persian architectural tradition with European stylistic influences in a way that is, even today, visually stunning. Mirrored mosaics, tile work, painted frescoes, carved marble thrones: the palace is as much a museum of decorative arts as it is a building.
The symbolic weight of the complex is immense. It was here, in the Hall of Mirrors, that the last Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, was crowned in 1967. After the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the palace was shuttered; it reopened to the public only in 1998, reinvented as a museum site. In 2013, it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List — recognition not merely of its architectural beauty, but of its layered role in Persian history, identity, and collective memory.
And then, on a March morning in 2026, a shockwave reached it. By mid-March, at least 140 museums, historic buildings, and cultural sites had sustained damage across Iran — including 5 UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
The Legal Architecture: Robust on Paper
Here is where the story gets legally interesting — and, frankly, frustrating.
The international community has spent decades building a normative framework specifically designed to prevent exactly this kind of damage. The cornerstone is the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, to which the United States, Israel, and Iran are all contracting parties. Article 4(1) of the Convention is unambiguous: parties must refrain from “any act of hostility directed against” cultural property. The only permissible exception is imperative military necessity — a carve-out that the Second Protocol of 1999 has progressively tightened, specifying that it applies only when and for as long as a property has become a military objective by reason of its actual use.
Beyond the 1954 framework, the 1972 UNESCO World Heritage Convention adds a further layer: Article 6(3) explicitly obliges State Parties not to take any deliberate measures that might damage, even indirectly, the cultural heritage of other States Parties. And then there is Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions, whose Article 53 prohibits acts of hostility against historic monuments, works of art, or places of worship that constitute the cultural or spiritual heritage of peoples. At the level of customary international law, Rules 38 and 39 of the 2005 ICRC Study confirm that these obligations extend across all types of armed conflict, international or otherwise.
For particularly significant sites — those of the “greatest importance for humanity”, including UNESCO World Heritage Sites — the Second Protocol introduces a regime of enhanced protection (Articles 10–13), under which immunity from attack is near-absolute and intentional violations constitute war crimes subject to individual criminal prosecution.
On paper, Golestan Palace should have been untouchable.
So Why Wasn’t It?
The day after the damage was confirmed, the US Committee of the Blue Shield published a statement noting, with considerable restraint, that “the failure to observe international humanitarian law, including numerous international conventions to which the US is a State Party, can lead to the commission of war crimes.” The statement came in direct response to remarks by US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who had announced that the US would conduct its air campaign without what he termed “stupid rules of engagement.”
UNESCO confirmed the damage and expressed deep concern, reiterating that it had shared the coordinates of all World Heritage sites with all parties. It stopped short of explicitly condemning the strikes.
This is not the first time the system has been tested — and found wanting. Golestan sits in a long, tragic lineage. The bombardments of Palermo in 1943 destroyed or severely damaged aristocratic palaces, churches, and centuries-old urban fabric, at a time when no comprehensive international framework even existed. The 1954 Hague Convention was adopted precisely because of the lessons of the Second World War. The war in Ukraine, which since 2022 has seen the destruction of the Mariupol Drama Theatre, attacks on the historic port of Odessa, and a drone strike on a building adjacent to the Bernardine Monastery in Lviv, shows that the system is equally strained today. Gaza, too, has witnessed the documented destruction of the Great Omari Mosque, the Pasha Palace, and portions of the Saint Porphyrius Church — reportedly sheltering displaced civilians at the time.
The pattern is striking: the legal instruments exist, they bind the parties, yet damage to cultural heritage continues to occur.
The Enforcement Gap: Law Without a Sheriff
The structural problem is not hard to identify. International cultural heritage law, for all its sophistication, is built on the premise of good faith compliance. It assumes that parties to a conflict will, in the heat of war, instruct their military commanders to verify that targets are not inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list, to check coordinates against a database of protected sites, to choose means of attack that minimise collateral damage to cultural property. Article 6 of the Second Protocol requires exactly this: verification, minimisation, proportionality, cancellation of attacks when protection status is apparent.
But international law lacks a coercive enforcement mechanism that operates in real time. The International Criminal Court can prosecute individuals for attacks on cultural property — Article 8(2)(b)(ix) of the Rome Statute qualifies the intentional targeting of buildings dedicated to art, education, or cultural purposes as a war crime — but prosecutions are slow, politically fraught, and come long after the damage is done. UNESCO can issue statements. The Blue Shield can warn of potential war crimes. More than 200 academics and cultural heritage professionals signed an open letter condemning the destruction in Iran. None of this stopped a single airstrike.
None of this is simple. But it is worth being honest about where the system is failing, because the failure is not uniform. It is not the case that all states treat their obligations under the 1954 Convention as equally serious. The UK, for instance, enacted the Cultural Property (Armed Conflicts) Act 2017, which introduces criminal offences with extraterritorial reach and integrates heritage protection into military planning through data-sharing with the Ministry of Defence. The United States ratified the 1954 Convention but has never ratified the 1999 Second Protocol — the instrument that transforms enhanced protection from a treaty principle into a prosecutable war crime under domestic law. This gap reflects a policy choice, and it has practical consequences when a US-led campaign damages a UNESCO site, the accountability architecture that the Protocol would have activated simply does not exist in US law, — and, it bears noting, the United States has not ratified the Rome Statute, placing American nationals outside ICC jurisdiction entirel. The problem, in other words, is not just political will in the abstract. It is the specific, traceable decision by specific states not to build the legal infrastructure that would make political will enforceable.
Beyond Law: The Economics of Destruction
There is a dimension of this debate that rarely features in legal scholarship but deserves attention, particularly for anyone who finds the lofty language of “humanity’s cultural heritage” a little abstract.
Cultural heritage is economic infrastructure. Golestan Palace, in a different geopolitical reality, was a major tourist destination in central Tehran. The sites in Isfahan inscribed on the UNESCO list attract visitors from across the world. Cultural tourism is one of the fastest-growing sectors of the global economy, generating employment, stimulating local economies, and contributing meaningfully to national GDP. When a site is damaged or destroyed, the loss is not merely aesthetic or historical — it is a loss of revenue, of jobs, of the soft power that comes from being a country people want to visit.
This logic holds across every conflict. The reconstruction of Mosul’s Old City after its partial destruction by ISIS is estimated to cost hundreds of millions of dollars. The damage to Mariupol will define the economic trajectory of that city for decades. In Gaza, the destruction of historic sites has eliminated irreplaceable assets from what was already one of the world’s most economically constrained territories.
None of this should be the primary argument for protecting cultural heritage — that argument rests on more fundamental grounds of human dignity, identity, and collective memory. Yet economic considerations often play an important role in public decision-making. For that reason, it is worth recalling that the destruction of cultural heritage also carries significant economic costs, affecting communities, tourism, and future development.
The Unresolved Question
The case of Golestan Palace, viewed against a legal system that is technically sophisticated and operationally limited, brings us to an uncomfortable place.
We live in a world where the normative consensus is clear: cultural heritage must be protected in armed conflict. The treaties exist. The customary law exists. The criminal liability framework exists. What does not exist — or does not exist with sufficient force — is the mechanism to make that consensus stick when a military commander in a war room decides that a nearby target justifies the risk.
The parallel with the bombing of Palermo in 1943 is illuminating, and not in a reassuring way. Between 1940 and 1943, Allied air raids targeted the city’s strategic harbour — but bombs repeatedly fell on the historic centre. The toll on the built heritage was severe: 119 historic buildings were damaged, including twenty palaces, thirteen public buildings, and 86 churches; eleven were completely destroyed. Among the sites hit was the Cathedral. Then, during WW2, the fragility of cultural heritage was explained by the absence of law. Today, 8 decades later, the same fragility manifests despite a fully elaborated legal architecture. The distance between the existence of the instruments and their effectiveness remains, in 2026, the unresolved question at the heart of international cultural heritage law.
Let us be honest about something. The conversation around cultural heritage protection can feel — from the outside — like a debate conducted by specialists, for specialists. Conventions, protocols, enhanced protection regimes, individual criminal responsibility: this is the language of international lawyers, art historians, and museum directors. It is tempting to conclude that it is, in some fundamental sense, a niche concern.
So, Who Is This Really For?
But here is the thing. You do not need to love Persian architecture to care about Golestan Palace. You do not need to have visited Tehran, or studied Qajar history, or have any particular attachment to mirrored mosaic ceilings. What you need to understand is simpler: “when a cultural site is destroyed, something that belonged to everyone is gone”. The rose garden of the Qajars was not built for lawyers or art historians. It was built, added to, and lived in over 5 centuries. It was closed for 19 years after a revolution. It reopened, became a museum, and was recognised by the international community as a place of global significance.
And the same logic applies in reverse. Protecting cultural heritage is not a luxury reserved for those with the education to “appreciate” it, or the means to visit it. The economic returns flow to communities, not to connoisseurs. The identity it anchors belongs to populations, not to experts. The sense of continuity it provides — the quiet reassurance that something older than us will outlast us — is one of the most democratic goods there is.
The real question, then, is not whether international law is sophisticated enough to protect cultural heritage in conflict. In many respects, it is. The more difficult question is whether the rules that States have collectively accepted can produce concrete effects on the ground, including when military and political pressures are at their highest.
Because if we are not, the gap between the promises of international law and the realities of armed conflict will remain unresolved: the bombs will keep ignoring UNESCO, and the rose gardens will keep burning.