Phillipe Sands’ event at the Edinburgh International Book Festival proved to be one of the most genuinely stimulating and thought–provoking thus far.
Sands is Professor of International Law at University College, London, as well as a partner at the esteemed Matrix Chambers, and his ‘East West Street’ is a remarkable journey of discovery and self-discovery which reveals something of the intersecting paths of history, law and coincidence.
Confessing his fascination with the possibilities of coincidence, Sands revealed some of the past of his own relations and those with whom he has come in contact with, both a spur to writing ‘East West Street’ and in the process of authorship.
Much of the book focuses on the unprecedented trials for war crimes conducted at Nuremburg from 1945. As Sands points out, such legal process had never been carried out before.
Although this aspect of Sands’ book is already extensively documented, ‘East West Street’ took him some seven years to write, and it is perhaps in its more personal insights that its interest will lie for many.
Hersch Lauterpact’s legal mind helped overturn the consensus that applied prior to 1945, that states had the right to dispose (even literally) of their citizens as they saw fit. An advocate of human rights from the 1920’s, his concept of ‘acts against humanity’ is the basis of international law in this area, and of the currently contentious European Human Rights legislation.
Lauterpact’s focus was on the individual, while Raphael Lemkin, Lauterpact’s fellow student at the University of Lwow, placed greater emphasis on collective rights, and these viewpoints have been in sometimes complementary, sometimes oppositional tension ever since.
Sands has an eye for telling detail; in 1939, Lauterpact was one of a family of eighty. By 1945, he was the sole survivor. Experiences such as this were by no means uncommon, nor confined to Europe’s Jews, and help explain the determination to ensure that not only would such events never recur, but that there should be justice for those no longer able to claim it for themselves.
As we know, mass murder and genocide in Lemkin’s terms, have disfigured the latter half of the twentieth century, and show no sign of ending.
Sands’ multi-layered, very personal memoir and meditation on the question posed by historian Yosef Yerushalmi; ‘is it possible that the antonym of forgetting is not ‘remembering’, but justice?’ is, as much as anything else, an affirmation that even in the dysfunctional self-obsessed world we live in, justice may yet prevail.
East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity