Philippe Sands

Early life and education

Sands was born in London on 17 October 1960 to a British Jewish family. He read law at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge attaining an LLB B.A. in 1982 and going on to achieve a first class honours in the LLM M.A. course a year later. After completing his postgraduate studies at Cambridge, Sands spent a year as a visiting scholar at the Harvard Law School.

Academic career

From 1984 to 1988 Sands was a Research Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge and the Cambridge University Research Centre for International Law (now the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law). He has also held academic positions at Kings College London (1988-1993) and SOAS (1993-2001). He was a Global Professor of Law at New York University Law School (1993-2003) and has held visiting positions at Paris I (Sorbonne), University of Melbourne, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Toronto, Boston College Law School and Lviv University.

Professor Sands is the co-founder of the Centre for International Environmental Law (1989) and the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (1997).

Legal career

Sands was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1985. In 2000 he was a founding member of Matrix Chambers and was appointed Queen's Counsel in 2003. Sands was elected a Bencher of Middle Temple in 2009.

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 a dozen cases at the ICJ, including the Nuclear Weapons Advisory Opinion (counsel for the Solomon Islands); the Georgia v. Russia dispute (counsel for Georgia) and the case concerning Whaling in the Antarctic (counsel for Australia). 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). 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.

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, he served as a Commissioner on the UK Government Commission on a Bill of Human Rights. The Commission’s Report was published in December 2012. 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". 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.

Writing, theatre and film

Sands is a contributor to the Financial Times and The Guardian and occasional contributor to the London Review of Books and Vanity Fair.

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 three staged productions exploring the public and historical impact of international law:

Sands' work on East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity (2016) formed the basis for the documentary My Nazi Legacy: What Our Fathers Did. 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 (the son of Hans Frank, the Governor-General of occupied Poland) and Horst von Wächter (the son of Otto Wächter, the Governor of Kraków in Poland and Galicia in Ukraine). The documentary, which explores the relationship between the two sons and their fathers, won the Yad Vashem Chairman’s Award at the Jerusalem Film Festival and was nominated Best Documentary at the Stockholm Film Festival and at the Evening Standard British Film Awards.

Sands serves on the Board of the Tricycle Theatre (since 2008) and English PEN (since January 2013). He is a Vice-President of the Hay Festival of Arts and Literature, and his interviews at Hay have included Julian Assange (2011); Vanessa Redgrave (2011); Keir Starmer (2013); John Le Carré (2013); Lord Justice Leveson (2014) and Tippi Hedren (2016).

Personal life

Sands lives in North London with his wife and three children. He is a supporter of Arsenal Football Club.

Prizes and Awards