Philippe Sands, the international human rights lawyer, academic and author, has a gift for making complex subjects accessible without losing sight of the people behind them.
At Saturday’s Edinburgh International Book Festival event, he moved between international law, family history and the politics of the present day. Stephen Gethins, the Scottish Government’s Minister for Europe, External Affairs and Energy, chaired the session. He introduced Sands as ‘an extraordinary storyteller’ whose work is ‘accessible and human’. By the end, the audience appeared to agree. The applause was prolonged.
An extraordinary storyteller
I first came across Sands through his BBC podcast The Ratline, in which he followed a trail of buried secrets from the Second World War. What struck me then was his patience. He would spend hours talking to people who had spent years protecting painful family histories. He waited until they were ready to talk.
That ability to turn research into a story has taken Sands well beyond the courtroom. The Ratline followed East West Street, the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning book about the origins of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Saturday’s event marked ten years since the publication of East West Street. Gethins began with a straightforward question: what has changed in those ten years?
Quite a lot, as it turned out. Brexit and Trump were obvious starting points. Sands was more concerned, though, with what he sees as a wider weakening of the international rules-based order. He pointed to China and Russia, but also to the United States. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he argued, has brought back a version of history that many people assumed was safely in the past.
A pitiful position
Sands was particularly forthright about the argument that Britain would be better off leaving the European Court of Human Rights. Britain helped create the court and originally saw it as a means of spreading British legal values across Europe.
The popularity of the ‘leave the ECHR’ argument, he suggested, says more about public debate and education than it does about the merits of the court itself. He described the Conservative and Reform position as ‘pitiful’, while acknowledging that it ‘resonates’ with many voters.
There was a slightly awkward point here, although Sands seemed conscious of it. He is a prominent international lawyer, a familiar face on the BBC, a (visiting) university professor and a regular contributor to the likes iof the Financial Times. Sands occupies much of the ‘establishment’ world that is increasingly criticised by the populist politicians he was talking about.
He was willing to make fun of himself. A reference to a dinner party in north London produced a laugh from the audience, clearly at his own expense. The room was sympathetic to him throughout, including when he dismissed Trump as a faintly absurd figure. It was less clear how much of what he said would have persuaded someone who did not already share his outlook.
That may partly reflect the nature of book festival audiences. Sands himself noted that he would have liked to see more young people in the room.
Trump came up several times. Sands linked his behaviour to his father and at one point called Trump ‘a monster’, as well as a tyrant and a bully. A recent conversation with his niece had left him convinced that Trump’s narcissism and appetite for bullying were inherited rather than simply created by his political career.
He praised Mark Carney for standing up to Trump and ‘not accepting bullying’. He also urged the British Prime Minister to do the same.
Digging into family history
The discussion became more compelling when Sands moved away from the broad sweep of international politics and talked about his own family.
East West Street began with questions he had not asked his mother about the family’s past. He was fifty before he started asking about the relatives who were rarely mentioned. Most had died in the Holocaust.
His mother had kept boxes of family papers. Those documents eventually led Sands to Lviv, now in Ukraine, and to the streets where his ancestors had lived.
He told this part of the story quietly. There was no need to dwell on the emotion in the room. It was already there.
Lviv has another important connection to Sands’s story. It was central to the thinking that helped shape the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity. The war in Ukraine has therefore brought the city’s history into the present in a particularly uncomfortable way.
The terrible truth of our present era
Sands was also asked about the word ‘genocide’, and about the difference between its everyday use and its meaning in international law.
His argument was that most people use the word more broadly than the legal definition permits. That becomes particularly contentious in relation to Gaza. Sands said that, in strict legal terms, the case for genocide is difficult to establish, whatever people may believe about the conflict. He also argued that the word has become ‘instrumentalised’ in political debate because of the weight it carries.
His assessment of the wider argument was blunt: ‘a mess’.
Sands has faced criticism for refusing to take a public position on Gaza. His explanation was that his professional work involves making legal judgments about comparable conflicts. He does not think it would be appropriate to prejudge such questions publicly, by ‘mouthing off in public’.
He returned to the history of the legal concepts at the centre of East West Street. Genocide and crimes against humanity emerged from the aftermath of the Second World War, but for decades they were largely unused. Yugoslavia and Rwanda changed that. They forced lawyers and courts to confront the concepts in practice.
Now, in 2026, they appear in the news almost every day.
Sands described that as the ‘terrible truth’ of the present era. The wider postwar legal settlement, he argued, was once regarded as something largely settled. It no longer is.
There was also a question about literature and whether books can make any difference to these debates. Sands’s answer was straightforward. Fiction and non-fiction can change the way people think and what they believe. That gives books a role which goes beyond simply providing an escape from the news.
I am an optimistic person
Despite everything he had said about the present, Sands did not want to end on a pessimistic note.
His argument was partly historical. Look at the last five years and the situation looks bleak. Look further back, however, and he believes the longer-term direction is more encouraging, even if progress is uneven. He does not expect the current assault on the post-1945 legal settlement to succeed in the long run. He is much less confident about the next five years.
‘I am an optimistic person,’ he said.
He urged the younger people in the audience, relatively few though they were, not to give in to despair. Instead, he asked them to look at what has actually been achieved.
The questions that followed covered some difficult territory. Asked about recent unrest in Northern Ireland, including violence against immigrants, Sands criticised politicians who ‘egg on’ people who want to blame immigrants for social problems and crime. He also criticised the selective use of facts. He described the atmosphere in some areas as ‘febrile and hostile’.
Social media, he suggested, has made the situation worse. He acknowledged the obvious difficulty of regulating it without damaging freedom of expression.
Artificial intelligence produced another concern. Sands spoke about his unease at AI-guided drones being used in active conflicts. He also questioned the dangers of allowing technologies with such power to be effectively controlled by a small number of people.
Towards the end, Sands was asked whether the law itself has become too political.
His answer was that we live in a political world, and that law and politics were never really separate.
It was a fitting way to finish an event that had moved from the Holocaust and the origins of international law to Ukraine, Gaza, Trump, AI and the state of British politics. Sands had made a subject that could easily have become abstract feel personal and immediate.
The audience clearly appreciated it. The applause at the end was long. It was not difficult to see why.
