Ideas - This lawyer turns real legal cases into page-turners

Episode Date: October 29, 2025

War criminals, Nazi fugitives, and a viable threat to American democracy — sounds like a classic page-turner but author and lawyer Philippe Sands isn't making this up. His book, 38 Londres Street is a retelling of legal history that probes the connections between former Nazi leaders and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The payoff isn’t just an intriguing read. For Sands, broad public engagement is key to the survival of hard-won systems of international justice.Philippe Sands delivered the 3rd Annual Irving Abella Lecture at Massey College in October 2025.We'd love to hear from you. Fill out our listener survey here.

This program is brought to you in part by Spex Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot. Squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Spec Savers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan, technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan.

Book at specksavers.cavers.caps are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit specksavers.cavers.cai to learn more. This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. You've probably had that experience of connecting the dots. I start writing a book about it. My grandfather. Latter Pact, and Lemkin. And then a fourth man comes into the story.

Maybe you discovered a pattern or a pathway through a mess or a mystery. Nothing makes me happier than spending time in an archive. 10,000 pages of letters, diaries, photographs, recordings, scraps of paper, newspaper cuttings. For Philippe Sands, connecting the dots has become a way of life, like high-stakes detective work. I find a three-page letter sent in May 1949 from a gentleman in Damascus, Syria.

Don't come to the Arab world. It's not a good place for us Germans and Austrians. Head to South America or South Africa. I'm curious as to who the author is. Philippe Sands teaches and practices international law and the connections he makes reveal crucial insights about the uses and abuses of power. We all smelled a rat. Insights about why certain institutions exist and why they need to be defended.

We cannot be complacent. We cannot take it for granted. We have to understand that what is, desired is simply to sweep away the totality of these achievements. Philippe Sands connects Nazi leaders tried at Nuremberg to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and shares how their fate's contrast with the recent decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on presidential immunity.

Even if in the exercise of these powers, he commits genocide or torture, As a former president, he will be immune from the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts. This is a very far-reaching conclusion, and it is completely at odds with the position that is taken in the Pinochet case, which itself draws on the principles in the Nuremberg proceedings. Sands has become adept at telling these stories to a broader audience, something he says is crucial for the legal profession, which has too frequently become isolated from public engagement. He's put that principle into practice,

writing books like his non-fiction East-West trilogy, which reads like John Le Carre novels. That may sound surprising, until you learn that the two were neighbors for years. He would turn up at the front door, holding a manuscript, the new Le Carre novel, and he said, usual procedure, usual procedure,

Because every John LeCarray novel has a disgusting lawyer in it. And my job was to check that the disgusting lawyer spoke like a lawyer, dressed like a lawyer, acted like a lawyer. But he would never put a little yellow sticky in, you know, page 394. So he'd have to read the whole thing. But in reading the whole thing, I came to learn the tricks because there are parallels. Philippe Sands delivered the 2025 Irving Abella lecture at Massey College in Toronto. In it, he tells the story of immunity, impunity, and what's really at stake for us today.

Thank you so much. Irving Abella was a child of that remarkable 1945 moment when the world changed with the construction of a new rules-based system. That rules-based system was reflected in the creation of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Tribunal. When the war came to an end, there was a commitment between various governments, including the government of Canada, to set up an international tribunal, the first international tribunal in human history. And one of the issues that had to be addressed was whether anyone who appeared before that tribunal would be entitled to claim immunity on the basis that the conduct which they were elizabeth, alleged to have engaged in was official conduct. And at that point in 1945, the immunity of a head of

state or a former head of state was absolute. So the issue of what to do about the immunity rule was absolutely central. And the immunity rule was addressed explicitly in a letter that Robert Jackson, who was on leave as a justice of the United States Supreme Court to accept the appointment as chief prosecutor at Nuremberg addressed when he wrote to President Truman on the question of immunity. It is, he wrote, an obsolete doctrine. It is a relic of the doctrine of the divine right of kings

and, he wrote to President Truman, it is inconsistent with the position we take towards our own officials. Jackson worried that giving immunity to former leaders would produce a paradox. The paradox, as he wrote, that legal responsibility should be the least where power is the greatest. And quoting an earlier British jurist, Jackson made the point to the American president that even a king is under God and the law. And the upshot was there was no right to immunity for anybody at Nuremberg in relation to the international crimes over which the tribunal exercised jurisdiction.

And that meant that Karl Dernitz, who succeeded Adolf Hitler as head of state, of Germany had no immunity. That meant that Hans Frank, who was effectively the sovereign of German-occupied Poland, had no immunity, both men were tried and convicted, and Frank was hanged for his crimes along with 10 other individuals. And that principle of non-immunity established for the first time in 1945 was then taken forward. It took a little time until the 1990s, when the United States led the world in creating two international tribunals for crimes committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda. And accordingly, former Serbian President Slobudan Milosevic was indicted, arrested and put on trial. And he died before the trial

concluded. When the International Criminal Court came into existence in 2002, having been negotiated, in 1998, and I participated in those negotiations, it dispensed with all immunities for international crimes over which it would have jurisdiction. Not only for former heads of state or government, such as former President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who's just been indicted, arrested, and transferred to the Hague, but also for serving ones. In addition to the warrant for Russia's President Putin, the ICC has issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Bashir of Sudan when he was still in office, and of course it has issued one in relation to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel. And one has to recognize the important

point that like the United States, none of these countries is a member of the International Criminal Court. Meanwhile, most of the world's nations, including Canada, which has played a very active role in this domain have signed many international agreements on international crimes. I'm thinking in particular of the conventions on genocide and torture. And these obliged countries to prosecute or extradite to another country which wishes to prosecute any person alleged to have committed those crimes. The agreements either explicitly exclude the right to immunity for any person or they pass in silence. on the question of whether a former head of state is entitled to immunity.

The U.S., like many countries, there's a party, and like Canada, is a party to those international agreements. By the turn of the millennium, one big element of the legal situation had become fairly clear, 50 years after Nuremberg. A former head of state enjoys no immunity with respect to international crimes before international tribunals. What remained unclear and not answered was what would happen if a former head of state

accused of an international crime was brought before a national court in a country other than his own. And that would be addressed for the first time in human history when Augusto Pinochet, former head of state of Chile, decided to take a trip to the United Kingdom. Kingdom, to go shopping and buying books at Hatchards, have tea with his friend Margaret Thatcher, and then on the evening of the 16th of October 1998, was arrested, whilst recovering from

a minor back operation in the London Clinic, in Devonshire Place, in the centre of London. His arrest was made pursuant to a warrant issued by a well-known Spanish judge, Balthazar Garzon, arguing that Augusta Pinochet had committed crimes against humanity, genocide, torture, and had disappeared people. Philippe Sands, international lawyer and best-selling author, most recently of the book 38 Londres Street, which traces the connection between Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and former Nazi SS commander Walter Rauf. Philippe Sands has witnessed many of the signal moments in international law firsthand, including the 1998 case against Augusto Pinochet. He was initially approached by Pinochet's lawyers to argue that the dictators should have absolute immunity from prosecution

as a former head of state. Sands found a way to decline that offer and instead acted as counsel for human rights watch as an intervener in the case before the UK's House of Lords. But that's just one part of the story. So, Park Pinochet at some place in your brains, because we're going to come back to it. Many years pass. And in April 2010, I received this invitation to go to an obscure place that I have never heard of called Leviv. come to Leviv and deliver a lecture at the city's university and law school on the cases I've

done on crimes against humanity and genocide. I googled Leviv. I discovered that Leviv was once called Lavov, was once called Leopolis by the Italians, and Lemberg by the Germans and the Austrians. and something clicked in my brain because my grandfather was born in Lemberg in 1904. And so I accepted to go and give the lecture, not because I had a burning desire to give a lecture on crimes against humanity and genocide, but because I wanted to find the house

where my grandfather was born. It was an issue of identity. I wanted to know more about who he was because he never talked about it, and I knew him well until I was 38 years old. never talked about it so I go off to Leviv in

October 2010 I've done a bit of preparation on this lecture and in the course of doing the preparation I'm able to bring to the city of LeViv news which is for the local inhabitants totally

astounding two pieces of news the first piece of news is that the man who put the concept of crimes against humanity into international law, Hirsch Lauterpact, was a student at that law faculty, and they were not aware. Lauter Pact worked with Robert Jackson in drafting the Nuremberg statute,

and he inserted the words into the statute, crimes against humanity, which Robert Jackson then run with. So I thought, well, that'll be exciting to tell them that one of their own is responsible for this subject. And then I discovered equally remarkably, or to some even more remarkably, that the man who invented the word genocide, Rafael Lemkin, had also studied law at this university that had invited me, and the people who invited me were blissfully unaware about it. So I turned up in LeViv with my mother and my aunt to protect me from my mother and my son to protect me from my aunt. and we share this astounding news that the origins of genocide and crimes against humanity as legal concepts invented in 1945 can be connected to the city of LeViv.

And I start writing a book about the three men, my grandfather, Lauter Pact, and Lemkin. And then a fourth man comes into the story. And the fourth man is Hans Frank, who was Adolf Hitler's personal lawyer from 1920. and 1933, and who then became governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland, in the course of which governorship, he became responsible for the regulations and decrees, which would cause the entirety of Lauterpac's family, Lenkin's family, and my grandfather's family, to be murdered. And so he became the connector in the story. In 2016, Philippe Sands published a book called East West Street

that featured a central character called Hans Frank. About a year passed, and then I started getting letters from the University of Modena in Italy. We are very embarrassed, Professor Sands. The letters would all go. In 1936, our university law faculty gave Hans Frank an honorary doctorate for his commitment to the rule of law. This is the man who was hanged at Nuremberg for the murder of 4 million human beings. Why hasn't it been rescinded?

I wrote back. Good question, they said. Italian law and the regulations of the University of Modena do not allow. an honorary doctorate that has been granted to be rescinded. It's actually the same thing with a Nobel Prize. Once you've given the Nobel Prize, you can't take it back. I argued against Ansang Sushi in the Rohingya case at the International Court of Justice. I sat this distance from her. She has a Nobel Prize. She defend what's happening in Myanmar. The Nobel Prize cannot be taken away. Seven or eight years passed. Six weeks ago, I get a

an email from the president of the university, dear Professor Sands, we're delighted to let you know that Italian law has been changed and the University of Modena regulations have been changed and the grand ceremony and dinner to mark the rescinding of the honorary degree given to Hans Frank 89 years ago will take place on the 31st of October. And we would be very honored if you would come and give the keynote address. So I responded very positively, but said that nevertheless, I had a condition. What's that, they said? My condition is that I do not come alone, but I would like to be able to invite Hans Frank's son,

Nicholas, who's a central character in my book, East West Street, and is a marvelous individual, to join me at this grand ceremony, and they authorised me to call. Nicholas, I called Nicholas. He said it would be the greatest day of his life. And so Nicholas and I will go off to Modena in Italy to attend the rescinding of an honorary degree given 89 years ago to one of the characters. These things are very curious. One thing leads to another. In writing East West Street, I then meet, I'm introduced by Nicholas Frank, the marvellous, son of Hans Frank to the less marvellous son of Hans Frank's deputy Otto Wechter, who is the principal character along with his wife, Charlotta, in the second book in the trilogy.

Otto Wechter was the governor of district Galicia based, well, he was based first in Krakow. His claim to fame is building the Krakow ghetto. and then when he destroyed the Jews in Krakow, he was transferred to Leviv to destroy the Jews of Leviv, which he did pretty extensively, it has to be said. His story was told to me by the son Horst, who did agree to meet with me

and was remarkably generous in giving me access to his parents' private family archive. And that private family archive became the basis for the detective story that is the ratline. Otto Wechter's escape from justice, his arrival in Rome in early 1949, and his attempts to flee to South America, interrupted by an unexpected and mysterious death. So that second book is a direct relation to the first. While I was researching the second book, I'm going through the archive given to me by Horst Wechter in relation to his parents. 10,000 pages of letters, diaries, photographs, recordings, scraps of paper, newspaper cuttings.

I love archives. Nothing makes me happier than spending time in an archive. I find a three, page letter sent in May 1949 to Otto Vector in Rome from a gentleman in Damascus, Syria. And the letter, I'm paraphrasing, basically says to Otto Vector yes you need to go on the run but don't come to the Arab world

it's not a good place for us Germans and Austrians head to South America or South Africa. Of course Vesta dies in mysterious circumstances a couple of months later, so it's never able to follow the advice. But having seen this letter, I'm curious as to who the author is. Turns out the author is a man called Walter Ralph. And I very quickly discover upon Googling that Walter Ralph's claim to fame

is that in 1941 and 1942, working under Heinrich Himmler and Reinhardt Heidrich, he was responsible for the design, management, and operation of a series of mobile gas vans that were precursors to the extermination camps and that would drive around Nazi occupied central and eastern Europe gassing people to death in groups of 50. and about 900,000 people are estimated to have been murdered in this way. He is hunted in 1945 and he escapes.

He's actually caught by the British, but escapes from a prisoner of war camp and makes his way to Austria. Rights to Wechter in May 1949, and at this point, I'm becoming curious as to what became of this particular individual. Pause for a moment. And I thought I had never heard of the name Walter Ralph, but it turned out that I was wrong. Because in 1980, as a 19-year-old student at university, I read, like many people from that period, a cult book, a travel book set in Patagonia, written by a man called Bruce Chatwin, called In Patagonia. Some of you are nodding and you will have read the book. if you go back to your copy, you will see that chapter 96 of in Patagonia is dedicated to Walter Ralph. In some way, Chatwin encountered Ralph or the name of Ralph when he was in Punta Arenas in Patagonia

and writes a chapter written in a glacial text. There is a man in Punta Arenas dreams of pine forests and sings, hums, German leader. And so I start looking into this Ralph person, what became of him. And what I'm able to discover pretty quickly is that he follows his own advice and decides to leave Syria and head to South America. Goes first to Italy,

picks up his wife Edith and his two boys, Alf and Walter Jr., and they sail from Genoa to Ecuador and then establish themselves in Quito where the man who ran the mobile gas fans becomes a motor mechanic for the Mercedes-Benz concession in Quito. You have to understand, I'm an Englishman who grew up watching Monty Python and it's the kind of horrible connection

that rings a certain resonant bell. Author, lawyer, and professor of international law, Philippe Sands, speaking at Massey College in Toronto. He was the 2025 Irving Abbella Lecturer. This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayad. This program is brought to you in part by Speck Savers. Every day, your eyes go through a lot, squinting at screens, driving into the bright sun, reading in dim light, even late-night drives. That's why regular eye exams are so important. At Specsavers, every standard eye exam includes an advanced OCT 3D eye scan,

technology that helps independent optometrists detect eye and health conditions at their earliest stages. Take care of your eyes. Book your eye exam at Specsavers today from just $99, including an OCT scan. Book at Spexsavers.caps.cavers.caiasts are provided by independent optometrists. Prices may vary by location. Visit Spexsavers.cai to learn more. This ascent isn't for everyone. You need grit to climb this high this often

You've got to be an underdog that always overdelivers You've got to be 6,500 hospital staff, 1,000 doctors All doing so much with so little You've got to be Scarborough Defined by our uphill battle And always striving towards new heights And you can help us keep climbing Donate at lovescarbro.cairbo.cairot.C.A.

In this episode of Ideas, we find author and lawyer Philippe Sanz in the middle of a story about a former Nazi commander seeking a life of anonymity in the mid-1950s. It's just one moment in his latest book, 38 Londres Street, a complex look at international law that reads like a page-turning detective novel. Sands continues with the story of SS commander Walter Ralph, shortly. after he'd arrived with his wife, Edith, and family, in Quito, Ecuador. Then in 1956, he and Edith meet an absolutely wonderful Chilean couple. And the Chilean couple say to the Ralphs, you're in the wrong country. You should be in Chile. We like people like you.

and there's lots of lovely Germans in Chile, head to Chile. And so two years later, the Ralph's pack up from Quito Ecuador, and they head to Chile. They settle in Punta Arenas, the southernmost town, actually in the whole world. And Ralph, bless him, becomes the manager of a king crab cannery, packing the the flesh of giant crabs into small aluminum tins for export to North America and Europe. And life is going swimmingly until 1963, when the system of international criminal justice catches up with him for a second time. And West German prosecutors issue a warrant for his arrest and extradition to West Germany to be charged with genocide and crimes against humanity.

He is arrested, he's taken up to Santiago, and eventually the Supreme Court of Chile addresses the question of whether this man can be extradited to West Germany. And by six votes to one, they say, no, he can't be extradited because Chile has a 15-year statute of limitations at that point. It's 1963. The crimes were committed with gas fans in 41 and 42. Twenty-one years has passed. He's off the hook. He goes back to Punta Arenas and resumes his life as the manager of the Pesquera Camelio, and he makes a good life for himself. There's a little bit of difficulty because by now, because of these wretched proceedings in Santiago, his photograph has been on the front page of every newspaper in Chile, and actually many newspapers in the world.

So this time, everyone in Puntairenais knows what it is that he is alleged to have done. But they don't seem to mind. It was long ago and far away. I've met many of the ladies who worked on the King Crabb production line with him, he was the boss, and who just said to me, Philippe, we were 16 years old, 17 years old. Yes, we heard all these stories about what had happened, but we only cared about two things, having a decent job and finding a husband. And you could understand, in a sense, in that part of the world, although they did all say that the older people who worked in the King Crab factory were much more bothered about having to work with this man as their boss. But be that as it may, the next 10 years are prosperous, successful.

He becomes a well-known figure about town, a bastion of the local community until September 11, 1973. September the 11th, 1973 is the day of the coup d'etat in Chile, when the elected government of Salvador Allende is overthrown and a four-man military junta takes over and at the head of the military junta is this man, former chief of the army, Augusto Pinochet. And Walter Ralph is absolutely elated. Why? Because the charming couple that the Ralphs came to know is. in Quito Ecuador were none other than Lucia and Augusto Pinochet.

The Pinnoshaes brought Ralph to Chile. The moment I learned that, the question arose in my litigator's brain, could it be, since they knew each other, that Ralph might have worked for Pinochet and used some of the same? skills he had developed in 1941 and 1942 to gather intelligence and perhaps even more nefariously to assist in the disappearance of human beings. There were rumours on the web and the question that any litigated before courts fears the most is the question from the judge which goes something like this. Very interesting, Mr. Sands, but what is your evidence for that proposition?

I cannot say, well, three taxi drivers in Santiago told me that they knew that that was what they'd heard and it was true. I need something else. If it is the case that Valter Ralph participated in any way in the disappearance of human beings in Chile in the 1970, 70s, there would be a direct personal connection from the characters I wrote about in East West Street, Hans Frank, through to the characters I wrote about in the ratline, Otto Wechter, through to the events in Chile in 1973, through to the arrest of Augusta Pinochet in 1998, straight onto my desk in London, dealing with disappearances, crimes against humanity in genocide. That's what I was interested in. And Philippe Sands' interest

centered on the legal issue of immunity. The House of Lords, the highest judicial court in the United Kingdom, rules in March 1999 that Augusta Pinochet does not have absolute immunity from the jurisdiction of the English courts. The fact that his conduct may be characterized as official conduct is not sufficient to get him off the hook. And that ruling by the House of Lords is premised on the fact that Chile, Spain and the United Kingdom were all parties to the Convention against Torture, and that Convention provides explicitly that any person who is alleged to have committed torture and who is found in the jurisdiction of the country which is a party to the treaty

is under an obligation either to prosecute that person for the international crime of torture or to extradite that person to a country where that person will be prosecuted. And the convention provides for no rule of immunity. So the complex question before the House of Lords was where a treaty is silent

but tells you the state that you've got to prosecute anyone who's committed torture, the House of Lords by a majority of six to one rules that it is necessarily implicit that a treaty that requires every person to be prosecuted has done away with the idea that a former head of state can claim immunity for that international crime. Ten months later, in January 2000, Jack Straw, the Home Secretary, announced that he had determined on the basis of medical advice given by four independent doctors that Augusto Pinochet was not fit to stand trial and therefore he could not be extradited to Spain

and he would be returned to Chile. We all smelled a rat. There was something about the way in which the decision was taken that caused many of the people who were involved in those proceedings to suspect that there had been some arrangement between the British and Chileans to allow Augusta Pinochet to return to his country. And so it took me 10 years to investigate that story until I was eventually introduced to the chief Chilean negotiator who dealt with the British authorities, an absolutely marvellous individual who to this day still works for the Chilean

Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has never told his story to anyone who described to me the conditions under which an agreement was entered into with the government of the United Kingdom. Christian Tolosa is his name and he was chosen by the president of Chile. He happened to be the Chilean president's chief speech right. because he had a PhD in psychology from the University of Exeter and he was believed to understand how the British mind works and his account of how they worked out an arrangement with the British is utterly brilliant and I learned that the British had a requirement in relation to the deal

Pinochet had, under Chilean law, since an amnesty law he had adopted in 1977, total immunity from investigation or prosecution in Chile. And there had been until 2000, when Pinochet returned to Chile, supposedly on grounds of ill health, not a single case in the Chilean court. in relation to the crimes of the Pinochet regime. There was blanket immunity and there was blanket impunity. And what the British required was evidence from the Chilean side that when Pinochet returned, he would be stripped of his immunity. And the Chileans came up with the necessary materials. Now, this becomes pretty significant in the Chilean context,

because until my book came out in Chile in April 2025, the position in Chile was that there is no document that has ever been identified bearing the signature of Augusto Pinochet, ordering an act of killing in the entire period during which he was. was head of state. But Christian Tolosa brings to London such a document concerning a series of killings that took place in October and November 1973, very notorious to this day in Chile, concerning a caravan de la Mueira, the caravan of death, killings.

When a murder squad went around Chile, killing, I think it's about 97 local, political and union leaders. So when Pinochet returns, he is stripped of his immunity. And he is investigated and he is indicted. And for the first time, the door opens to justice in Chile. And so you cannot say of the Pinochet story as a whole, it reinforced a sense of impunity. It didn't. It opened the door to justice. And the quid pro quo for his not going to Spain but being returned as a sick old man supposedly but invented, as I've now been able to show, was that justice started to be done in Chile. And this in broader geopolitical terms is important because for many people in Chile, including people

who were not supporters of Augusta Pinochet, there was a real problem with Spain trying Augusto Pinochet. Not a legal problem, but a sort of moral, ethical problem. Why? Spain was the former colonial power of Chile, and that bothered a lot of people that the former colonial power should try our leader for crimes committed in Chile. But there was a second and bigger problem, and that was that Spain had never done justice in relation to the crimes of the Franco regime, this day, there has never been a single proceeding in relation to the disappearances, the killings that happened from the late 1930s all the way through to the mid-1970s. And it really bothered a lot of Chileans that Spain should accord to itself the right to do justice in relation to Chile when it had not

done justice in relation to Spain. And frankly, I'm pretty sympathetic to that argument. I can see why that is a problem, and I can see why in the route, notwithstanding the fact that many people that I'm close to in Chile are still, to this day, very upset that Pinochet returned and wasn't sent to Spain. It opened the doors to justice in Chile. I won't now go into the question of what I discovered with Ralph. Suffice it to say, and we'll be here for hours,

Suffice it to say that despite the absence of documentary evidence, I was able to meet various individuals, including one who was detained under the Pinochet regime in the summer of 1974, July 1974, taken to a place called 38 Londros Street, which is right in the centre of Santiago, had been the headquarters of the Socialist Party appropriated by Pinochet. and turned first into a detention centre, then an interrogation centre, then a torture centre, then a disappearance centre. And I finally meet a man called Leon Gomez, who tells me he was interrogated by a man with a German accent, who sat behind a large typewriter, and when he was able to peek under the headband that protected his eyes from seeing anybody, he recognised the man in question,

because as a 10-year-old boy in 1963, he'd been fascinated by the stories about this Nazi called Walter Ralph, appearing on the pages of the Chilean newspapers, and he recognized Ralph. And I would then meet other people who had been interrogated or told me they'd been interrogated by Walter Ralph, including one story which absolutely mirrors the tale told by the great Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman, death and the maiden, of a woman who is raped by a man she never sees, but recognises his voice. And I met two people who were in that situation precisely. Philippe Sands, tracing the zigzagging path of his 2025 book, 38 Londres Street.

In telling that story, Sands makes a strong case for one legacy of the Nuremberg trials after World War II, the denial of immunity to public officials accused of involvement in genocide and other crimes against humanity. And at Massey College in the fall of 2025, he warns that this isn't some distant tale. preserved in amber. You may think these are sort of esoteric issues that have no resonance today. That would not be right. In July 2024, the United States Supreme Court

by six votes to three adopted a ruling, which basically said, in the case of Trump versus the United States, States, that a former president of the United States has absolute immunity in relation to core constitutional functions. In other words, those functions which are explicitly articulated in the U.S. Constitution, he can never be subject to proceedings even after he has left office. and for all other conduct, there is a presumption of immunity in relation to these matters. Now, the judgment was of interest to me for many reasons.

Six of the nine justices adopted this ruling despite the fact that the US Constitution says nothing about the immunity of a president. and despite the position taken by Robert Jackson, 80 years earlier, which adopted a very contrary view. I think it's important to note that the majority's judgment did not speak to the issue of crimes under international law, torture, disappearances, genocide, which the United States has historically joined, if not led other countries in condemning. But the logical reading of that judgment is that if a president commits acts of torture, genocide, or disappearance, as official conduct, which are part of his core constitutional powers, he will be immune from the criminal jurisdiction of the U.S. courts in relation to that conduct once he has left office. the Supreme Court had never previously addressed a former president's immunity from criminal suit. In the Nixon era, it had ruled on a former president's immunity from civil suit, but that is a very different thing. There was no direct precedent on which to rely.

And as with the Pinochet case, there were points of commonality, all nine justices agreed that there is no immunity for private acts. So if an American president, tortures a gardener as a private act, there's no immunity. It is limited to official conduct. Like everyone else, wrote Chief Justice Don Roberts, the president is subject to prosecution in his unofficial capacity. But for all official conduct, the president, unlike everyone else, is protected by a general principle of immunity. The nature of presidential power, writes John Roberts, requires immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts during tenure in office. But John Roberts never really gives any explanation as to why that should be.

And so what this means in practice, think of what happened with Pinochet and think of what happened at Nuremberg, is that where the president exercises what the Supreme Court calls core constitutional powers under Article 2, powers that might involve military, action, foreign affairs, and national security more generally, that's not an exhaustive list, he will have absolute immunity. And he will have an immunity that extends to matters of evidence. In the view of the majority, without such immunity, a president might be deterred by fear of criminal prosecution from taking what the majority called bold and unhesitating action. the public interest requires. Even if in the exercise of these powers, he commits genocide or

torture, the majority seems to be saying, as a former president, he will be immune from the jurisdiction of the US courts. This is a very far-reaching conclusion, and it is completely at odds with the position that is taken by the House of Lords in the Pinochet case, which itself draws on the principles led by Robert Jackson in 1945 in the Nuremberg proceeding. You go back to Nuremberg and you go back to Pinnichet and ask yourself what the consequences would have been if they had adopted that approach in those cases. So that tells you a little bit about where we are right now. I'm going to limit myself to these comments only focusing on the legal aspects. But I think it is the case that we are now at a sort of inflection point

in terms of certain countries' commitment to the rule of law. This was encapsulated for me most powerfully in an article that was just published two weeks ago. Some of you may have seen it in the wonderful Saturday Financial Times always begins with an essay on the front of pages. And the essay was by an Italian writer Giuliano da Empoli. The article was published on the 27th of September 2025, so just really just a week and a half ago. And I'm just going to quote the conclusion of that article because I think it encapsulates where we may be heading in relation to this country's largest local neighbor. Quote, populist leaders and tech bros do not have the same vision of the future in mind. What they have in common,

however, is both an enemy and a strategy. Kill all the lawyers. Together, political predators and digital conquistadors have decided to wipe out the old elites and their rules. If they succeed in achieving this goal, it will not only be the parties of lawyers and technocrats that will be swept away, but also liberal democracy, as we have known it, until today. In reading that article, I came to understand the points of connection between what the Supreme Court had done in July 2024 and the kinds of actions we're now seeing in places like Turkey, Hungary, and I'm so very sad to say it, the United States. and in a sense it's helpful to have this pointed out and made articulate because I think we need to know what it is that we are up against.

What we're up against are the movements that began in 1945 as a consequence of the horrors of that period, which led to things like Nuremberg and then many years later the various international courts and tribunals and then the remarkable ruling of the people. finish a case. And I think all that is in play. We cannot be complacent. We cannot take it for granted. We have to understand that what is desired is simply to sweep away the totality of these achievements. Now, that is a big thing to say. And in the short term, I feel rather pessimistic, frankly, and anxious. But in the longer term, I feel much more optimistic. I think it's very likely that we will go into an even darker place than we are now, and that there will be further catastrophes. But out of those catastrophes, I do think history tells us that there will then be a rebuilding. and the rebuildings that have come in the past

after terrible catastrophes have always built on what came before and so we're in a down moment we don't know where it's going to lead to and we need to start thinking about what comes next when we emerge from that down moment I often tell the story

of having been a very young academic in the mid-1980s at Cambridge University where I had an absolutely wonderful colleague called John Baker, who was the professor of English legal history, still very much around and very active, a wonderful person. And he would invite me for lunch, and as a young research fellow at St. Catherine's College,

it was really exciting to be invited by him, and he would ask me what it was that I was working on. And I would tell him what I was working on with Ellie Lauter or whatever, and he'd stroke a little beard and say, oh, yes, oh yes, yes. We had a similar problem to that in English law in 1472, and it took 275 years to sort it out. And I think that's sort of where we are.

It's a long game. We're in a difficult moment, and we've just got to stick to the principles and values that we care about, because they will come good in the end. But before they come good, it's likely that there'll be a very difficult time. And I think the story in 38 laundress streets illustrates the long arc of history

in dealing with these kinds of things. Thank you so much for this invitation. You've been listening to author and international law professor Philippe Sands, delivering the 2025 Irving Abela lecture at Massey College in Toronto. This episode of Ideas was produced by Sean Foley.

Technical production by Sam McNulty and Emily Kiervezio. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly, and I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to CBC Podcasts, go to CBC.com. Podcasts.