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Philippe Joseph Sands, KC FRSL Hon FBA (born 17 October 1960) is a British and French writer and lawyer at 11 King's Bench Walk and Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at University College London. A specialist in international law, he appears as counsel and advocate before many international courts and tribunals, including the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the International Criminal Court.
Sands has served on the panel of arbitrators at the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). List of Arbitrators, Court of Arbitration for Sport; accessed 18 April 2016.
He is the author of seventeen books on international law, including Lawless World (2005) and Torture Team (2008). His book (2016) has been awarded numerous prizes, including the 2016 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and has been translated into 24 languages. His latest books are (2020) about Otto Wächter, The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy (2022) about Chagos and the life of Liseby Elysé and 38 Londres Street: On Pinochet in London and a Nazi in Patagonia (2025).
Sands served as President of English PEN from February 2018 to April 2023 and was a member of the Board of the Hay Festival, from 2018 to December 2024.
In 2019, he was appointed the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Sands was the co-founder of the Centre for International Environmental Law (1989) and the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (1997).
Sands has acted as counsel and advocate in cases that span a wide range of subject areas, including:
Sands has acted as counsel in more than two dozen cases at the International Court of Justice, including the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion (counsel for the Solomon Islands); the Georgia v. Russia dispute (counsel for Georgia); Whaling in the Antarctic (counsel for Australia); Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965; and Application of the Genocide Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (counsel for The Gambia). He has also been instructed in inter-State arbitrations, including the Chagos Marine Protected Area Arbitration (counsel for Mauritius) and the dispute between the Philippines and China over maritime jurisdiction in the South China Sea (counsel for the Philippines).
Prior to accepting appointments as ICSID arbitrator (since 2007), Sands acted as counsel in ICSID and other investment cases (including Tradex, Waste Management and Vivendi). Profile: Arbitrator Professor Philippe Sands QC, icsid.worldbank.org; accessed 18 April 2016.] Sands now sits as arbitrator in investment disputes and in sports disputes (CAS).
In 2005, Sands' book Lawless World catalysed legal and public debate in the UK on the legality of the 2003 Iraq War. The book addresses a range of topics including the Pinochet trial in London, the creation of the International Criminal Court, the War on Terror and the establishment of the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. In the second edition of Lawless World (2006) Sands revealed that the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had told President George W. Bush that he would support US plans to invade Iraq before he had sought legal advice about the invasion's legality. Sands exposed a memorandum dated 31 January 2003 that described a two-hour meeting between Blair and Bush, during which Bush discussed the possibility of luring Saddam Hussein's forces to shoot down a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, an act that would cause Iraq to be in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions.
The memo disclosed that Blair told Bush that he would support US plans to go to war in the absence of a second UN Security Council Resolution, apparently contradicting an assurance given by Blair in the UK Parliament shortly afterwards on 25 February 2003. Sands has maintained the view that there was no basis in international law for military action in Iraq. Philippe Sands' Letter to the Chilcot Inquiry (10 September 2010) ; accessed 18 April 2016.
Sands' 2008 book Torture Team sets out in detail the role of senior lawyers in the Bush administration in authorising torture (including so-called 'enhanced interrogation techniques' at Guantánamo Bay). As a result of his work on Torture Team, Sands was invited to give oral and written evidence to the UK and Dutch Parliaments, as well as to the US House of Representatives and the US Senate:
In 2009, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker on Sands' reaction to news that Spanish jurist Baltazar Garzon had received motions requesting that six former Bush officials might be charged with war crimes.
From 2010 to 2012, Sands served as a Commissioner on the UK Government Commission on a Bill of Human Rights. The commission's Report was published in December 2012. A UK Bill of Rights? The Choice Before Us, nationalarchives.gov.uk; accessed 18 April 2016. Sands and Baroness Kennedy disagreed with the majority, and their dissent ("In Defence of Rights") was published in the London Review of Books.
Sands and Kennedy expressed concern that support for a UK Bill of Rights was motivated by a desire for the UK to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights. Writing in The Guardian in May 2015, Sands argued that plans for a British Bill of Rights could leave some people in the UK with more rights than others and that this would be "inconsistent with the very notion of fundamental human rights, in which every human being has basic minimum rights."
On 17 September 2015, Sands gave a public lecture at the UK Supreme Court entitled "Climate Change and the Rule of Law: Adjudicating the Future in International Law". Climate Change and the Rule of Law: Adjudicating the Future in international Law, supremecourt.uk, 17 September 2015. He expressed the view that a ruling by an international judicial body, such as the International Court of Justice, could help resolve the scientific dispute on climate change and be authoritative and legally dispositive.
In December 2015, Sands (and two colleagues at Matrix Chambers) drafted a Legal Opinion on the legality of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia for Amnesty International, Oxfam and Saferworld. The Opinion concluded that by authorising the transfer of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the UK government was acting in breach of its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, the EU Common Position on Arms Exports and the UK's Consolidated Criteria on Arms Exports.
On 16 April 2018, Sands co-authored a piece in The Times in which it is argued that the UK had no established legal basis for the 2018 missile strikes against Syria.
In November 2020, a panel of international lawyers chaired by Sands and Florence Mumba started drafting a proposed law criminalising ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems. The law could be in force within five years, he told the Financial Times in July 2021.
In February 2024, Sands argued in favour of the State of Palestine at the International Court of Justice's case on Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. He said that "Palestinian statehood is not dependent on the approval of Israel" and that international law of self-determination required other "UN Member States to bring Israel’s occupation to an immediate end. No aid. No assistance. No complicity. No contribution to forcible actions. No money, no arms, no trade, no nothing." He also claimed that the State of Israel "has arrogated to itself the right to decide who owns Palestinian land, who may live on it, and how it must be used" and its support for 700,000 settlers living illegally in the occupied Palestinian territory as "demographic manipulation of the highest order". Sands refuted the US and the UK claims that an advisory opinion from the ICJ would negatively impact future negotiations.
Sands frequently comments on issues of international law and is a contributor to BBC programmes, Sky News, CNN, Al Jazeera and national radio and TV stations around the world.
His written work has formed the basis for four staged productions exploring the public and historical impact of international law:
Sands' book East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (2016) has been translated into twenty languages. It formed the basis for the documentary . The film is directed by David Evans and premiered in April 2015 at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was released in the US on 6 November 2015 and in the UK on 20 November 2015.
Sands wrote the script and appears in the film alongside two sons of prominent Nazi officials, Niklas Frank (son of Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland) and Horst von Wächter (son of Otto Wächter, the Governor of Kraków in Poland and Galicia in Ukraine). The documentary, which explores the relationship between the sons and their fathers, won the Yad Vashem Chairman's Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival and was nominated in the Best Documentary category at the Stockholm Film Festival and at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.
In 2018, Sands wrote and presented the BBC Radio 4 documentary Intrigue: The Ratline, about the disappearance of senior Nazi Otto Wächter, investigating the "ratlines" by which he escaped justice. Sands has since published a book on this topic.
In 2001, Sands published an Introduction to Franz Kafka's The Trial. Vintage Publishing
In 2020, Sands published The Ratline: Love, Lies and Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive.
In 2022, he published The Last Colony: A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain's Colonial Legacy about Chagos, where "a secret decision was taken to offer the US a base at Diego Garcia ... create a new colony (the 'British Indian Ocean Territory') and deport the entire local population." As summarised by The Observer: "The Chagossians were forced from their archipelago in the Indian Ocean in the 1970s, and Britain still refuses to hand it back.On February 12, 2025, The Wall Street Journal reported, "British Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced in October that the U.K. would cede sovereignty over the Chagos Islands to Mauritius." Green, Dominic. "Keir Starmer Is a Danger to the U.S." The Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2025. Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands relates the wider tragedy of the scandal with nerve and precision."
In May 2024, Sands joined the pianist Emanuel Ax, who was born in Lviv, for a performance at the Philharmonie de Paris entitled 'Justice, words, music: five moments'. This formed part of a series of events for which the Philharmonie invites figures from the artistic world and the world of ideas to take a look at music and to question the meaning of listening in order to approach ethical, political and social questions in a new light.
Sands served for a number of years on the Board of the Tricycle Theatre. He was President of English PEN from February 2018 to April 2023 (having served on the Board since January 2013). From 2018 to December 2024, he was a member of the Board of the Hay Festival, and his interviewees at Hay have included Julian Assange (2011); Vanessa Redgrave (2011); Keir Starmer (2013); John le Carré (2013); Brian Leveson (2014) and Tippi Hedren (2016).
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