On January 26, 2017, the Daejeon District Court ruled that a South Korean temple could retain possession of a Buddhist statute that was stolen from a Japanese shrine in 2012 on the grounds that Japanese pirates had previously stolen it from South Korea centuries earlier. According to a news report, the thieves that stole that statue were caught trying to sell the statue in South Korean. It was slated to return to Japan, but a court granted an injunction requested by a South Korean temple in 2013 that kept the statute in South Korea until its historical ownership could be determined. Both South Korea and Japan are members of the 1970 Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property, which obliges the state parties to “prohibit the import of cultural property stolen from a museum or a religious or secular public monument or similar institution in another State Party to this Convention after the entry into force of this Convention for the States concerned, provided that such property is documented as appertaining to the inventory of that institution.”