Sweden has formally handed back 39 Benin objects to Nigeria, in one of the largest single restitutions of the looted royal art to date. The handover was completed at a ceremony in Lagos on 5 November, when Britta Soderqvist, director general of Sweden's National Museums of World Culture, signed the transfer agreement with Olugbile Holloway, head of Nigeria's National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The objects, known as Emwin Arre, now belong to Nigeria, although six of them will remain in Sweden for a further ten years under a loan arrangement.

The pieces were seized by British troops during the 1897 sacking of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Edo State, and later acquired by the former Ethnographic Department of Sweden's Natural History Museum in Stockholm. The group includes works in copper alloy, ivory and wood. Oba Ewuare II, the monarch of Benin, described the return as the result of years of sustained advocacy, saying his family had campaigned for the objects through several generations.

In parallel, Sweden is returning 77 sacred objects to Bolivia, taken from graves near the village of Nino Korin in the 1970s and later sold to a museum in Gothenburg. The group, which includes the skull of a Kallawaya healer, will go to the National Museum of Archaeology in La Paz. Both restitutions were approved by the Swedish government in 2023, and the museums have spent the intervening years completing the legal and logistical work.

The Swedish move adds to a quickening European trend. Germany handed over a substantial collection of Benin bronzes in 2022, the Netherlands returned 119 objects in 2025, and Cambridge University transferred legal ownership of 116 pieces to Nigeria in February. The British Museum, by contrast, has ruled out the immediate return of its own Benin holdings, proposing collaboration instead.