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Philippe Sands

Philippe Sands QC is Professor of Law at University College London. His most recent book is Torture Team. (September 2010)

IN THE REVIEW

A Very British Deceit

George W. Bush and Tony Blair after a joint press conference in the early days of the Iraq war, April 8, 2003

A year ago British Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced a long-awaited inquiry into Britain’s involvement in the 2003 Iraq war, to coincide with the departure of British troops from the country. The Iraq inquiry would be chaired by a retired senior civil servant, Sir John Chilcot—a “safe pair of hands,” …

The Complicit General

Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security

by General Richard B. Myers, USAF (Ret.), with Malcolm McConnell
The silence of Myers and others indicates the uncomfortable truth that the full circumstances in which the CIA and then the US military adopted interrogation strategies amounting to torture remains to be explained.

NYR DAILY

Before the Nazis: A Ukrainian City’s Contested Past

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

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.