An international conference has opened in Washington to discuss the restitution of art and other property seized by the Nazis during the Holocaust.Delegates from forty-four countries as well as several non-governmental organisations are meeting to draft guidelines for the identification and eventual return of such assets.

The US State Department, which is sponsoring the conference, believes that some two-hundred-and-twenty thousand works of art were confiscated by the Nazis.

The BBC Arts correspondent says the conference,following on from a similar one about Nazi gold last year, aims to establish principles to avoid messy legal disputes.

As the conference began, Boston's Museum of Fine Arts said that a Claude Monet painting it has on loan from France was probably looted from its Jewish owner during the Second World War.