Philippe Sands, Professor of the Public Understanding of Law at UCL, first published East West Street in 2016, followed by The Ratline in 2020. 38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia, out now, serves as the final instalment of the trilogy. An extensive work of scholarship, the book looks at the concept of impunity in international law, the arrest of and attempt to extradite Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, and the link to SS Officer Walther Rauff.
UCL Student Storyteller Zoe Dahse spoke with Sands to gain some more insight into the development of the book.
ZD: The book’s central argument is about impunity. Why is this concept important in today’s world, under the scope of international law?
It’s been important for some time. It came on the scene in 1945 with Nuremberg and became more relevant again in the early 90s with Yugoslavia and Ruanda and the creation of an international criminal court, and it’s been on our agendas ever since. Right now, it’s a big issue with Russia in the Ukraine and Israel and Gaza and Sudan and the question of the US Supreme Court judgement in relation to the immunities of a former president for official acts. So, it’s a moment of impunity: we live in an age of conversations surrounding impunity.
ZD: Pinochet was the first case where a former head of state was attempted to be extradited. Did heads of state change the way they considered immunity after Pinochet?
It was a revolutionary moment: it had never happened before in history that a former head of state could be arrested in another country for crimes committed in his home country for international crimes. The question of immunity had never come up before, and the House of Lords Judicial Committee ruled that there is no absolute immunity, and that Pinochet can be investigated, indicted and extradited for certain international crimes. Ever since then the world has been very different because it sent a very clear signal to leaders of the possibilities of a tap on the shoulder. It’s not just theoretical, and the precedent has been huge.
ZD: The idea for the book’s central characters was set into motion when you came across a letter in a family archive in Austria from Walther Rauff. When do you look at something and think that it might lead to something?
I think when you’ve been litigating for 35 years, you tend to have a kind of sixth sense. It’s not always right but quite often there is something there. The hunch here was that there might be a connection between the crimes committed by the Pinochet regime and possible involvement of Walther Rauff. This was interesting to me as it could draw an unbroken line from the work I had done with East West Street and Hans Frank through to The Ratline and Otto Wächter onto 38 Londres and Walther Rauff. Pinochet was indicted for crimes against humanity and genocide, and that’s what my original book in the trilogy was about. It was a hunch based on a connection from what I had been writing and working on for the last 15 years and the hunch of proved to be right.
ZD: Fascinatingly, you were approached by Pinochet’s advisors to defend him when he was arrested in 1998, and you mention the taxicab rank principle, requiring lawyers to take on any case presented to them. If you had taken on that case, would your career look different?
Everything would have been different. If I had done it, I would have been associated forever with acting for Augusto Pinochet and the claim of immunity. Thankfully I was redirected by the very clear instruction of my wife not to take the case. Personal things touch everything, and we must be honest about that.
ZD: It is a complex thing you have structurally put together, moving between many themes and ideas. How do you approach trying to explain international law whilst making it digestible for the reader to understand?
Readers are smart and can deal with complexity, so the role of the writer and the storyteller is to lay it out in a way that is restrained but reasonably straightforward. There were two issues I was essentially chasing throughout the book. Firstly, what were the real circumstances of Pinochet’s return to Chile in March 2000, and secondly, was there a relationship between Walther Rauff and Augusto Pinochet. As soon as the reader as that at the forefront of their mind at the beginning, they can work out that everything that follows is connected to those two key questions. Ultimately, it is a complex story with many people involved and many strands: my role as storyteller is to make it as accessible and simple as possible.
ZD: In the foreword you make clear the distinction between fiction and fact. For example, there are multiple references to the character of Walther Rauff being presented in literature, which conflate with who he was in real life.
That’s one of the main themes of the book: the relation between fiction and non-fiction. Three of the big writers I refer to throughout, Bruce Chatwin, Roberto Bolano and Pablo Neruda, demonstrate how poets and writers of fiction and nonfiction have a very important role in telling us what has happened. The remarkable Neruda writes an article in 1965 which essentially predicts what happens: he castigates the Chilean legal system for failing to send Rauff to West Germany but concludes his involvement with the use of vans in Pinochet’s DINA. It is amazing that it tells us that. I am fascinated by the relationship between the world of law, literature, judges, and writers and the line between fact and fiction.
That’s why I write: it’s an act of advocacy. "
ZD: How did you approach a project of this level of intensive scholarship, and reach your conclusions?
You need documents or witnesses, and there is very little by the way of documents, but witnesses I found teased open the whole thing. But it was a long journey: over 9 years of digging away. My style is not to impose on the reader a view, so I’ve left certain things open. I’m teasing out, based on information, what is likely to have happened and then leaving it up to the reader to work out what it is exactly that happened.
ZD: Why is writing this book important in terms of getting people interested in it and talking about it?
The trilogy of the three books is part of a bigger project which is interacting with the public on issues I care passionately about: mainly the idea of a rules-based system in the international order and rules protecting the rights of individuals and groups. I came to realise 20 years ago that it wasn’t enough just to interact in my community of international lawyers and academics and judges. If we’re going to nurture and safeguard the rights that were put together in 1945, you’ve got to create a bigger constituency, and so you’ve got to tell bigger stories and stories about why it’s important. That in essence is why I write: it’s an act of advocacy.
ZD: How does this work feed into your work teaching public understanding of law at UCL?
I sort of have three lives: I’m an academic and a teacher, I’m a practitioner and a barrister, and a writer of these kinds of stories. The spine for the three stories is the same: it’s rules of international law relating to the wellbeing of humans and so one thing feeds off of the other. The writing style is very connected to my academic life and it’s also very connected to my life as a barrister. Our job is to lay out the material in a way that allows students to form their own views in different directions. I’ve always loved it when students disagree with me and reach their own conclusions and views, which are different from mine. In these times where people are expressing very strong views and trashing others who don’t hold the same views, adopting a different path is important. ZD: You’ve conducted research and interviews with people from all sides of the debate, including people who worked for Pinochet. What is it like interviewing people you might not agree with?
It’s important to know how people across the spectrum think, and not to judge any person you work with. I often interact with people I may not agree with, but I give them the space to lay out their views, without comment or criticism. In The Ratline I gave Horst Wächter the space to defend his father even though I don’t agree with him. Some people think I’ve been too generous but that’s the style of doing the work that I do. My role in these books is to do the investigation, lay out for the reader not only what I found but how I found it and not to impose on the reader any conclusions. Everything is open to interpretation, sometimes more reasonably than at other times.
" My role in these books is to do the investigation, lay out for the reader not only what I found but how I found it and not to impose on the reader any conclusions. Everything is open to interpretation, sometimes more reasonably than at other times.
ZD: It’s an impressive skill to present this kind of scholarship across complex themes.
That’s due to a fantastic editor I have, Vicky Wilson at Alfred Knopf, who basically said to me you need to put yourself into the story which was very difficult for an academic to do. And secondly, to not only tell people what you found but to tell people how you found it as people will be interested in that. It means people talk to you because they know you will respectfully reproduce what they’ve told you and that makes it more likely they will meet you and share remarkable stories.
ZD: What projects are you working on next?
A book on ecocide, coming out in 2027, and I’m trying a hand at a novel, based on the life of Miss Tilney who appeared in East West Street. She is an evangelical Christian missionary who saved my mother’s life and I’m fascinated by her as a woman. A truly remarkable human being who never shared publicly what she did. One of the main themes that emerged from these three books is what makes bad people tick but equally interesting is what makes good people tick. That’s equally important in our times because we’ve had a turn towards nationalism and populism and xenophobia and that will require many people to make some hard choices and to take our principles seriously.
38 Londres Street is out now. Sands gave the 2024-25 UCL Europe Lecture , in conjunction with the UCL European Institute, on 13 May 2025, and you can watch it here.
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