Philippe Sands: “Don’t impose your emotions or your conclusions on the reader”

(Versión en español aquí)

Philippe Sands (London, 1960) is a writer, university professor and international lawyer. He has been involved in cases concerning the war in Yugoslavia, the Rwandan genocide, the abuses in Iraq and Guantanamo, the indictment of Pinochet, the killing of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafic Hariri, the persecution of the Rohingya and, right now, the Chagos ilsands, among other prominent cases. He has exchanged with President Bashar al-Assad on the limits of his legal immunity as chief of State and argued against  Aung San Suu Kyi in The Hague. Sands negotiated the creation of the International Criminal Court, and, not being satisfied with the four offences that underpin the modern system of international criminal law (war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and aggression), is now leading efforts to put  a fifth crime in the Rome Statute, namely: ecocide. 

Apart from his many academic publications on different international law issues, and from being a regular contributor to The Financial Times, The Guardian and Vanity Fair, Sands is the author of several essays, plays and novels, including East West Street and The Ratline. He is the president of English PEN and trustee of the Hay Festival. We seized the opportunity of his recent visit to Geneva to arrange a meeting at the Albatros, a cozy Spanish bookshop in the center of the city, barely four minutes by foot from Borges’ grave. Rodrigo, the endearing owner, welcomed us to his studio in the back room. The air of a worn-out world hardened the atmosphere. It no longer seemed right to start the interview by discussing Sands’ obsession with Nazi criminals, or his friendships with Javier Cercas and John Le Carré. We live in a different reality, which demands different beginnings: 

Should President Putin be prosecuted for international crimes? 

That’s something I’ve been working on. A couple of weeks ago, I was asked by The Financial Times to write an opinion piece on an aspect of law regarding Ukraine and Russia. For some reason these things write themselves, so I just started writing. I wrote a piece in two hours to call for the creation of a special criminal tribunal to prosecute the crime of aggression in Ukraine. 

The next 24 hours were a little crazy, as I received hundreds of messages of support. And then Gordon Brown got in touch and said: “Let’s do this”. And for the last ten days I’ve been working on creating one. So I think it is an idea that may happen.