Interview with Philippe Sands
Professor Philippe Sands, whose article on “Reflections on International Judicialization” appears in EJIL vol. 27, no. 4, speaks with the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal, Professor Joseph Weiler. Unlike other editions of EJIL: Live!, this episode offers a fascinating and moving discussion of Sands’ remarkable new book, East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. The conversation takes viewers along the many paths of research and discovery that Sands took in writing the book, beginning from a chance invitation to deliver a lecture in Lviv in 2010. In the conversation, as in the book, Sands explores the geographical “coincidence” of his own grandfather as well as Hersch Lauterpacht, founder of the concept of crimes against humanity, and Raphael Lemkin, who invented the concept of genocide, having their origins in the small town of Lviv. He notes that the big lesson he learnt from writing the book is that in order to understand the concepts we deal with in international law, we have to understand personal histories.