Philippe Sands is a novelist, Professor of Law at University College London and a practicing barrister. Human rights lawyer, he has been involved in many important cases, including Pinochet, Congo, Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Iraq, Guantanamo and the Yazadis. The duty to remember and the question of responsibility run through all his books. He argues that ecocide should be brought before the International Criminal Court. His multi-award winning books include East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. (Retour à Lemberg / Albin Michel, 2021).
“We were like animals in that slave ship,” Liseby Elysé remembered of her 20-year-old self. She was four months pregnant. Her child was subsequently stillborn. Her story is the guiding thread of Sands’ last book The Last Colony (Weidenfeld/Albin Michel 2022). Elysé was called to the International Court of The Hague by Philippe Sands in 2018 to represent the people of the Chagos Islands, the Indian Ocean archipelago from which, in 1973, the entire population was forcibly removed by the British colonial administration in order to establish a US military base. “People were dying of sadness.” Elysé spoke to the 14 international judges of the court about that history for just under four minutes. But no one present would forget her testimony.