From the Babylonian captivity to the Trail of Tears, the history of rulers forcibly removing or even annihilating subject peoples is a long and sordid one, but the scope and brutality of Nazism necessitated the creation of new terminology. “New conceptions require new terms” was the concise judgment of exiled lawyer Rafael Lemkin in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, one of the first attempts to describe the scale of Nazi atrocities during World War II. Lemkin’s book and eventual involvement in the Nuremberg Trials introduced key concepts to the nascent field of international law. Decades later, these ideas have germinated into an ambitious project that seeks to manage international affairs through decrees and edicts instead of tanks and bombs.
Terms such as “genocide” and “crimes against humanity” are deployed so frequently in modern political discourse that the casual observer might think they have some ancient, musty origin. In truth, both are recent inventions. In a strange twist of fate, the terms were invented by two Jewish jurists educated in what is now the Ukrainian city of Lviv. Lemkin, who coined the word “genocide,” and Hans Lauterpacht, who invented the phrase “crimes against humanity,” were both refugees from a region that endured the successive horrors of Nazi and Soviet occupations. The two figures were recently rescued from semi-obscurity by Philippe Sands, a prominent British writer and barrister who shares Lvivian roots with Lemkin and Lauterpacht and might fairly be described as their 21st-century successor. In East West Street, Sands weaves the origins of modern international law into a deeply personal tale that touches on his own family history and Lemkin’s and Lauterpacht’s stories of escape and exile. As the luckless citizens of Lviv endure yet another foreign invasion, Sands’s book — and the ideas that inspired it — are worth revisiting.
When reading Sands, it is sometimes difficult to separate the author from his subject matter, and not just because his family shares a city of origin with Lemkin and Lauterpacht. A roll call of Sands’s legal cases — the South China Sea, Israel-Palestine, and the Chagos Islands are just three examples — reads like a news chyron of global hot spots. Sands is also one of the founders of Matrix Chambers, an influential British law practice that specializes in human rights cases. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who counts Sands as an adviser and rose to prominence at a similar legal organization, is clearly influenced by this milieu to the extent that critics have accused him of suffering from an acute case of “lawyer brain.” If you’re looking for a writer who exemplifies the class of lawyers, judges, and politicians behind 21st-century international law, Sands is as good a choice as any.
The trouble with Sands is not his writing or his carefully researched history but his worldview. A central problem facing any international legal system is how to formulate a genuinely universal set of rules. Proto-international legal regimes, such as the laws of war, were narrow and only observed among Europeans. They were also honored more in the breach than in the observance. The first forum for international arbitration was created in the Hague in 1899 at the high-water mark of Western imperialism. Unsurprisingly, it was much easier to formulate a “universal” legal framework in an era dominated by a few globe-spanning powers.
Even the moral clarity of the struggle against Nazism couldn’t hide the difficulties in formulating international legal standards. “Crimes against humanity” and “genocide” are often used interchangeably, but as Sands relates in East West Street, Lauterpacht feared that Lemkin’s new term would shift the focus from individual rights to group identity, while Lemkin thought Lauterpacht’s own ideas were too narrow. Lauterpacht’s 1945 book on international law conspicuously omitted any mention of property rights, a sop to the United States’s ideologically rigid Soviet ally.
A related problem is the question of enforcement, a matter that Sands generally avoids in East West Street. International law tends to wax and wane with the military power of the Western countries where the concept originated. The Nuremberg Trials, which Sands examines through the lens of disgraced Nazi jurist Hans Frank, were only possible because the Allies won the war. And even then, British and American lawyers tiptoed around their Soviet counterparts. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and NATO seemed poised to enforce international law at gunpoint. At the height of this fleeting unipolar moment, the war-torn Balkans still took priority over distant Rwanda.
Sands describes the creation of the International Criminal Court in 1998 as the culmination of international legal concepts pioneered after WWII. Viewed in the harsh light of 2025, the court will likely be remembered as a symbol of Western overconfidence in the brief period between the fall of the USSR and the reemergence of a multipolar landscape. In May 1999, Sands writes, Slobodan Milosevic became the first serving head of state to be indicted on crimes against humanity. Crucially, however, Milosevic was deposed not by lawyers but by a NATO air campaign. In 2023, the ICC issued an arrest warrant for Russian President Vladimir Putin. The question of how to get the formidable Russian autocrat in front of a judge has yet to be answered.
Today, Western countries increasingly squabble among themselves while non-Western powers are less inclined than ever to abide by Western rules. Meanwhile, a system of international law designed with the Holocaust in mind is poorly equipped for 21st-century challenges. To take just one example, modern asylum law has to contend with mass migration enabled by modern transportation, social media, gangs of human traffickers, and sympathetic nongovernmental organizations. All of these factors would have been unimaginable to Lemkin, Lauterpacht, and their contemporaries.
Reasonable people may disagree about thorny problems such as immigration. For Sands, however, electoral reverses or public criticism are not reasons for the internationalist legal project to trim its sails, but “populism,” which is just about the nastiest word in his vocabulary. Indeed, Sands views the modern nation-state, the very basis of democratic sovereignty, as artificial. This is not an exaggeration or mischaracterization of his views. It’s a direct quote.
The idea that human rights should transcend borders is a powerful one, but international law has gradually transformed into an esoteric discipline that places fealty on obscure rules over common sense. The European Court of Justice, another transnational legal body with an ambiguous remit, recently determined that Danish social housing law is discriminatory because it allows authorities to break up neighborhoods where over 50% of residents are of non-Western origin. Whatever one thinks of the Danish policy, it is a democratically sanctioned approach to the problem of immigrant ghettoization that plagues every major city in Western Europe. Should the question of how to integrate newcomers be left to Danish voters and their elected leaders or a passel of lawyers in Luxembourg?
If Sands’s legal philosophy ultimately fails to persuade, his affection for Lviv, the city of Lemkin, Lauterpacht, and his own grandfather is still touching. To Sands, Lviv fascinates because it is “a city on the edge of many places.” Readers in search of good travel writing should try City of Lions, a book that combines Sands’s own reflections on the city with the remembrances of the Polish-American writer Jozef Wittlin.
THE SPY WHO CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD
Lviv has not led a charmed existence — its 20th-century history was punctuated by war and political repression and bookended by a disorienting post-Soviet transition period. Although it has fared better than many Ukrainian cities since the 2022 Russian invasion, Lviv has endured airstrikes, power outages, and a long and growing list of casualties. Still, it’s not hard to see why Sands likes the place. With its grand opera house, charming cafes, and magnificent baroque architecture, the city has a whiff of the old imperial grandeur that characterized its late-19th and early-20th-century golden age under the Habsburgs. The appeal of that era to an international lawyer is obvious. Under the firm but relatively gentle hand of a distant dynasty, Lviv emerged as a cosmopolitan entrepot for all manner of Eastern European peoples, including Poles, Jews, Germans, Ukrainians, and Armenians.
Of course, the Habsburgs did not rule by edicts and law courts alone. Their empire was backed by a famously intrusive bureaucracy, a large army, and a secret police. Its subject peoples were knit together not by idealism or fealty to shared principles but by conquest, dynastic marriage, and diplomatic maneuvering. Its history is, or should be, a reminder that force is the final arbiter in world affairs.
Will Collins is a lecturer at Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary.
