Philippe Sands’ work straddles his two great passions, law and literature. As a lawyer and expert in international law and one of the driving forces behind the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Sands has reflected on the foundations of human rights and concepts such as war crimes and genocide. With his literary work, halfway between family memoirs and history, he goes beyond the law: he explores the human dimension of these crimes, the motivations of the perpetrators, and the contradictions sometimes hidden in the bloodiest horrors. After a literary career that has led him to delve into Nazism and the Holocaust with works such as East West Street and The Ratline, in his latest book, The Last Colony, Sands enters a new terrain: the colonial past. Through an approach to the history of the Indian archipelago of Chagos, whose sovereignty is still in dispute between the United Kingdom and Mauritius, Sands tackles the traumas of colonisation that persist today.
In this session, one of the most relevant and unique British authors talks about his dual career as a writer and lawyer: his work to ensure that crimes against humanity do not go unpunished and how literature allows us to explore the presence of evil in the human condition.
