Philippe Sands receives the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade: A choice could hardly be more timely and interesting

But Philippe Sands, who was born in London in 1960 to Jewish parents, works at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. The writer Peter Handke and the recently deceased Slavenka Drakulić, for example, have already made research visits to trials there. The Court in The Hague always attracts literary interest.

Commitment to Palestine

Sands can safely be described as “one of today’s most important human rights lawyers,” as the Stock Exchange Association does. As a lawyer, he has already advocated, among other things, for the Solomon Islands (against the threat and use of nuclear weapons), for Georgia in the legal dispute with Russia (over South Ossetia), also for Palestine in the proceedings on the legality of the Israeli occupation (which certainly caused lengthy discussions in the jury), and currently for Gambia in the proceedings against Myanmar regarding the military’s acts of genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

And: Sands is working to have “ecocide” recognized as a criminal offense at the International Court of Justice, the destruction of ecosystems.

Book about the trial of Pinochet

In fact, Sands not only works at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but also writes books, legal non-fiction on the one hand, and literary non-fiction on the other, a mixture of literature, non-fiction and reportage. Only a year ago he published “The Disappeared from Londres 38. About Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia” in German by S. Fischer Verlag (like all Sands books in this country).

It’s about the trial of former Chilean dictator Pinochet in London at the end of the 1990s, which Sands attended in a supporting role. The trial ended in 2000 with Pinochet being extradited to Chile, where he was under house arrest but lived a relatively free and unrepentant retirement.

But Sands connects this process with his research into the ex-SS officer Walther Rauff, whom the lawyer had come across by chance in the archives of an Austrian family (while researching for another book) and who, although head of a shrimp factory in Punta Arenas, may have helped Pinochet in his crimes against opposition members.

As Sands says in his foreword: “It is a personal journey. It is about justice and memory and impunity, across time and place, and about the ties that intertwine our strange existences, in which questions and coincidences so often arise.”

One could understand this as Sands’ credo as an author. He took a similar approach in his other books: “The Rat Line – a Nazi on the Run”, a book about the life, escape and death of the SS officer Otto Waechter. He came from one of the most respected families in Austria, was a trained lawyer and was the Nazi governor of Krakow and Galicia from 1939 and was wanted as a mass murderer after 1945. Waechter died in 1949, and a chance encounter with his son put Sands on the trail.

Other books by Sands, also translated into German, are “The Last Colony: Crimes against humanity in the Indian Ocean” . Or “Return to Lviv”. In it, Sands tells of the persecution and murder of Jewish people in Lemberg during the German occupation. At the center of the book: the lives of two Jewish lawyers, Hersch Lauterpacht and Raphael Lemkin, who took part in the Nuremberg Trials and were instrumental in establishing internationally valid law.

How did the jury justify its decision, with reference to Sands’ books: “In his literary work, which is as convincing with its narrative brilliance as it is with historical depth, Philippe Sands looks at both the motives of the perpetrators and the suffering and lives of the victims.”

In his books, Sands shows what lies behind legal, repeatedly discussed terms such as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity”. The election of Philippe Sands as Peace Prize winner could not be more timely, comprehensible and up-to-date.