Britain and the world: From Chagos to Ukraine and beyond
Philippe Sands KC, renowned barrister, spoke at the Intellectual Forum on 16 October about his career in international law and his views on some of the most pressing human rights issues of our time.
Philippe was in conversation with Dr Julian Huppert, Director of the IF and former MP for Cambridge.
The conversation began with Philippe's story of how he became a barrister, from applying to Cambridge to study economics (he switched to law within a few weeks of starting his studies), to when he was invited by one of his Cambridge lecturers, Professor Sir Elihu Lauterpacht, to join him in a new research centre—now the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law.
From those beginnings, Philippe has established an international reputation, litigating cases before the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, and the European Court of Justice. He is Professor of the Public Understanding of Law at University College London, where he directs the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals. He is also the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.
Recently, Philippe has been involved in bringing a case against the UK on behalf of the Chagos Archipelago, a group of islands which were taken from native Chagossians by the British government between 1967 and 1973. Recalling being asked to take the case, Philippe said: "I felt embarrassed that I didn't know. I didn't know that the British government had so recently forcibly deported 2,000 human beings who were all black, all descended from enslaved people. How could it be that I knew nothing about this? How had I missed this?"
Philippe and the Chagos Islands won their case against the UK, and negotiations are currently underway about how to resolve the matter on the basis of international law. Amidst those conversations, he is actively involved in some of the most immediate conflicts of our time: he is working to establish a special tribunal on Russia's crime of aggression against Ukraine, and he is horrified by the conflict in Israel and Palestine.
"Right now, it's a very intense period", he said. "Basically, I wake up in the morning and I'm juggling between negotiations on Chagos [...] and then I jump from that in the space of this morning to Palestine - Israel, Israel - Palestine, and then you jump from that to Ukraine and creating a special tribunal for the Crown. So it feels, oh my God, how are we going to get through today?"
But when Julian asked if he was optimistic for the future, Philippe responded that he is. "Because it's a long game", he explained. "One of the big influences that I had when I was a young research fellow, coming back to that early period, is a wonderful academic at St. Catharine's, professor of English legal history, [Professor Sir] John Baker. And he would sometimes very generously say, come and have lunch. Tell me what you're up to. And I would tell him what I was up to and he'd sort of say, 'Oh yes, yes, we had a similar problem in English law in 1437. And it took 263 years to sort it out'. And he's right. We're just at that stage where we're finding our way".
