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‪The path mapped out by the Sarr-Savoy report on the restitution of African cultural heritage is expected to introduce new ways of thinking about restitution law, based on a new relational ethics. Until 2018, the claims of African peoples and States for the return of their cultural property, of which they were dispossessed during the colonial period, were impeded by the rules on public collections, which formed the basis for an institutional refusal to restitute. But since the 1960s, a different approach has been adopted at international level; the claims expressed, right up to the United Nations, have grown in number and intensity. From this chorus of international resolutions, declarations and recommendations emerged a legal principle of restitution that today tends to fertilise the national law of former colonial States and to turn claims into legal rights.‪