Country Summary for ALGERIA

Definitions

"Cultural Goods"—
            1) Immovable cultural property

            2) Movable cultural goods; or

            3) Intangible cultural goods or traditional cultural expressions. (1998 Law, Art. 3)

"Movable Cultural Goods"—

            1) The outcome of explorations and archaeological, land and aquatic surveys;

            2) Objects from antiquity such as tools, pottery, engraving, currency, seals or stamps, jewelry, traditional clothing, weapons and funerary remains;

            3) Objects found during the division of historic sites;

            4) Anthropological and ethnological materials;

            5) Cultural goods related to religion, the history of science and technology, or the history of social, economic and political evolution;

"Artistic Goods of Cultural Interest" (subset of "Moveable Cultural Goods")—

            1) Paintings and drawings, done entirely by hand, on any medium and with any materials;

            2) Original engravings, posters and photographs;

            3) Original artistic montages, in any medium, productions of artistic statues and sculptures, in any medium, and objets d’art in any medium such as glass, ceramic, metal, wood, etc.

            4) Manuscripts and original writings, books, documents or publications of special interest;

            5) Numismatic objects of interest such as medallions and coins, or philatelic goods;

            6) Archival documents, including recorded texts, cards and other cartographic material, photographs, cinematic films, sound recordings and machine-readable documents. (1998 Law, Art. 50)

Registry

A general inventory of categorized cultural goods is hereby established by the Minister of Culture, which shall include a supplementary inventory and a list of protected areas…The registration of cultural goods shall be effective after the Minister of Culture has proclaimed them as such and they shall be published in the Official Journal of the Algerian Republic…The general inventory of cultural goods shall be updated and published every ten years in the Official Journal of the Algerian Republic…The manner in which these provisions will be carried out is fixed by regulation. (1998 Law, Art. 7)

Registration of a cultural good on the supplementary inventory shall entail all the legal effects of classification for a period of ten years. The effects shall cease to apply after this time period if the cultural good is not formally classified before the expiry of this time period. (1998 Law, Art. 51)