Philippe Sands wins Baillie Gifford prize for East West Street

Professor Philippe Sands QC has won the Baillie Gifford prize for his book East West Street: On the Origins of Genocide and Crimes against Humanity.

He said he would share the £30,000 prize with his fellow shortlisted author Hisham Matar and that the pair would be donating the money to a refugee charity “minus the cost of a bottle of cognac for Hisham and a jar of pickles for me”.

Baillie Gifford judge Jonathan Derbyshire said: “It is a biography of a city, an excavation of certain secrets or holes in his family history, and really impressively, it’s also the biography of a pair of ideas, genocide and crimes against humanity … It’s a reminder that these words, which for most of us are a settled part of our moral vocabulary, are recent acquisitions, and that only the incredible persistence and bravery of the figures in the book meant they became a part of the architecture of international law.

“It’s an incredible performance to hold the strands together and make them cohere.”

He added that we have lived with international law for 70 years but which “after recent events looks slightly more perilous than it did a week ago”.

In last Friday’s Irish Legal News, Kapil Summan spoke to Philippe Sands about threats to international law.