Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands is Professor of Law at University College London, and author of East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity. His new book The Ratline will be published in February 2021. He has served as counsel for Mauritius in the Chagos matter for ten years, but the views here expressed are personal. (June 2020)

Former inhabitants of Chagos Archipelago, the last British colony in Africa, claiming compensation for being exiled from their homes, High Court, London, October 31, 2002

Britain’s Colonial Legacy on Trial at The Hague

Never more clearly than now have I seen how the untaught, unspoken legacy of colonialism has rendered the UK unable to confront the perceptions of others, and the realities of its racist past and their continuing legacy.

June 23, 2020

Milla Bankowicz and Robert Wieckiewicz in Agnieszka Holland's In Darkness (2012)

Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past

Tucked away in the far western corner of present-day Ukraine, the city of Lviv defies expectations. Far smaller than Kiev, it was a closed city during the Soviet period from 1945 to 1991, and even today remains relatively little known. Yet in the early twentieth century, it was home to a roughly equal number of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews and as a result the city played a special and largely unrecognized part in shaping our modern international system of human rights. I have been spending time in Lviv, exploring its remarkable but largely unknown legal history.

May 30, 2012