Meteorites: International law and regulations

Abstract

Although meteorites are now considered as scientific objects, they still bear a strong and powerful symbolic meaning due to their extraterrestrial provenance. The present article focuses on their legal status, in other words the collection of rules, very diverse in nature, which are applicable to them. Despite a growing international market, the question of meteorites is often ignored or regarded as a detail in international relations and is rarely taken explicitly into account in negotiations and treaties. This relative neglect explains why a non‐State player, the Meteoritical Society, has taken methodological initiatives into meteoritic science and has effectively become a regulator of meteorite naming and acceptance, with a global scope. We show that to understand the legal status of meteorites, it is necessary to consider them under the prism of public international law, transnational law, and national law. We conclude that, despite the universality of meteorites as extraterrestrial objects, the variability of legal rules applicable to meteorites depending onto which territory they fall or where they are found. We note, however, that there is a trend toward regulatory uniformity in the scientific analysis of meteorites, which frames the practices of researchers and regulates traders’ activities. Finally, we contend that a meteorite remains a badly defined legal object, because it can be viewed under many angles: as an object susceptible to private appropriation, as a “common thing” (res communis), or as an element of national heritage.

Colomera (Granada, Spain): More than a century of an IIE iron meteorite journey

“…Thus, after almost a century of custody in the MNCN, the main mass of Colomera is now in private hands, which corroborates that meteorites are legally illdefined objects (Gounelle and Gounelle 2019).…”

“…The final objective is to describe the details of the judicial process that returned the fragments housed for almost 80 years in the MNCN to the heirs of the Spanish family that discovered the meteorite. This information is of special interest in regard to the future international development of patrimonial legislation for meteorites (Gounelle and Gounelle 2019).…”

Mineralogical, petrological and planetological heritage. The (Italian) story so far

“…In particular, a rigorous and objective cataloguing of meteorite specimens could help both museum curators and researchers to prevent the black market of meteorites, providing clear data about the place of recovery and the manner in which the meteorite specimen was acquired. This is a key information considering that international laws about meteorite acquisition are not uniform (Schmitt 2002;Fasan 2004;Gounelle and Gounelle 2019). In this regard, the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums (2013) pointed out how museums have to supervise new acquisitions to ensure that any specimen for purchase, gift, loan, bequest, or exchange had not been illegally obtained.…”

Unexplored Antarctic meteorite collection sites revealed through machine learning

“…Being directly accessible at the Earth’s surface, meteorites provide important insight into nebular and planetary processes. Antarctic meteorites are especially important in this context because of their pristine states and the existing legal framework that ensures their availability for scientific research ( 1 ).…”