Human rights, the intimate and Philippe Sands

One day in 2018, Liseby Elysé appeared before the International Criminal Court (ICC) and declared: “I came to The Hague to get my island back. » Forty-five years earlier, like all of the approximately 1,500 inhabitants of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean, she was forced into exile by the United Kingdom, which became sovereign in 1968 over this former Mauritian territory soon emptied of its population to allow the United States to set up a military base there. She was 19 years old. She never came back.

Beside her, in The Hague, where she is about to testify, stands the Franco-British lawyer Philippe Sands, a tireless defender of human rights in the hottest areas of the planet. Hired by the government of Mauritius, he obtained from the ICC a historical judgment, which recognizes the injustice committed against Liseby and her family and imposes on the United Kingdom to authorize their return. To date, however, nothing has been done. In Mauritius, the Seychelles, London, the Chagossians are still waiting. “We have the right to live therethey say to Philippe Sands, we will never give up. »

That’s what simultaneous publication is for, in English and French – “the Chagossians don’t speak English, having the book immediately translated into French was a matter of respect”explains the lawyer to the “World of Books” -, The Last Colony. Awaken public opinion. Putting at the service of the Chagos the literary power that Sands’ two previous books have made known to the whole world, Back to Lemberg and The sector (Albin Michel, 2017 and 2020). And because this way of linking politics and literature, far from any ideological discourse, by uniting the powers of one and the other to insert them together in reality, makes his work unique, this book, a fascinating synthesis of all the lives of its author, provides a perfect opportunity to reflect on each of them, and on the whole that they ended up creating.

Voice

” Back to Lemberg completely changed my life”, notes Philippe Sands. A lawyer since 1985, professor of international law at the University of London, author of several academic and political essays – untranslated – he had never spoken about himself, his family history, the ghosts who haunt him. “In these professions, he says, one does not allow one’s own voice to speak. We hide it. And there, when, in 2010, I was invited to give a lecture at the University of Lviv [Lemberg, au temps de la domination autrichienne], in Galicia, western Ukraine, where part of my family is from, something is triggered. There is a voice coming out. »

Any ample and intimate set, stirring, in Back to Lembergchildhood history and memories, the Holocaust, the creation of the legal concepts of genocide and crimes against humanity, the Nuremberg trials, the exile of his grandfather and the death in the camps of his great-grandmothers, this voice is found today in The Last Colonybut on a different plane.

Restored with force and precision in the translation of her friend the novelist Agnès Desarthe – “We have known each other forever, she knows how I think, and what she has achieved is great” –, it seeks first of all to make others heard: those of Liseby and the Chagossians, which it is a question of bringing into people’s consciences. But, by brief slips, the lawyer hints at the impact their story can have on him, and how much one can plead, fight, play politics, and be stirred in the depths. Her “own voice”, then, reappears. It is all the more overwhelming.

Consequences

The sectorwhich extends Back to Lemberg by investigating the post-war escape of Otto von Wächter, Nazi governor of Galicia, made even more spectacular a feature already present in the first book: the art of Philippe Sands is an art of the whirlwind, a precipitate of reactions in chain. The success of Back to Lemberg allowed The sector which, in turn, leads to the writing, still in progress, of a new story – the conclusion, planned for 2024, of what the writer sees as a trilogy –, so much, with each publication, the testimonies flow, opening up other avenues, which the author hastens to follow.

It is a literature of consequences. Each book is an act, it bounces back into life, and life takes Philippe Sands elsewhere, far away, where he could not have planned to go before everything started to stir. Like when, in 2010, the Prime Minister of Mauritius contacted him, because of his book Lawless World (“a world without rights”, Allen Lane, 2005, untranslated), in which he attacked the British government over the 2003 war in Iraq, and that he found himself defending the Chagossians. “Sometimes you reach a certain point in your life where there is no going back: you have to move on. Nothing can stop you, except the great fall, or death”, he comments. The dazzling rhythm of each of these books, their sense of suspense, of the leap forward, be it in legal or historical analyses, stem from this aesthetic which is also an ethic, an availability to what happens.

Ukraine

For a long time, Ukraine remained for Philippe Sands a phantom territory, which he knew was, with others, his, but, he says: “We didn’t talk about it in my family. It was in 2010, before going to give my lecture in Lviv, that I asked my mother if we had any documentation on the pre-war period and the war. I was 50 years old. I had never asked the question. » Back to Lemberg, in this sense, is a narrative of exploration. Sands goes there to meet the terra incognita from which he comes.

It is not difficult, therefore, to measure the shock which the Russian invasion represented for him. And as he could not stand idly by in the face of this tragedy, the lawyer, this time, relayed the writer, calling very fast to the creation of a “special court to judge the crime of aggression committed against Ukraine”. “The ICC has jurisdiction over war crimes and crimes against humanityhe explains, but there is a hole in the crime of aggression, a well-established category of international law. »

This leader, he believes, is the one who, more than any other, can allow Russia to be called into question quickly – provided that a sufficient number of countries support the approach, the object of all his current efforts. “There is movementhe adds. Several European countries are in favor. Unfortunately, Germany will not move if France does not move and, for now, France is blocking. But I am an optimist. I want to believe that, when the time comes, France does the right thing. »

Exile

Philippe Sands slipped a bomb in The Last Colonyand her name is Liseby Elysé. “We know that we touch a lot more when we tell the lives of peoplehe comments. However, Liseby is a woman who cannot read and write, but who is at the highest level of consciousness. And then, she is an extraordinary storyteller…” If the lawyer restores the Chagos case with implacable virtuosity, the writer does not fail to do his job either: he embodies, he shows, he gives to hear. Liseby’s song of nostalgia and anger returns throughout the text like a bewitching loop. It makes the cause irresistible, and that was Philippe Sands’ goal when he placed the Chagossian woman at the center of the book.

But everything about him is constantly double, at least. And, through Liseby’s voice, his own rises again. The one who, in Back to Lembergled the reader on the paths of exile followed by his family – his mother, as a child, also had to abandon his native land, he recalls in the course of The Last Colony. The one who defends, today, the Ukrainians attacked, invaded, thrown on the roads. The one that runs through all his work and his entire career as a lawyer, that the same obsession with justice saturates and raises. His voice, his “own voice”who also sings the song of the exiles, and asks for reparation.

Critical

To get things moving in the Chagos

“The Last Colony” (The Last Colony. A Tale of Exile, Justice and Britain’s Colonial Legacy), by Philippe Sands, translated from English by Agnès Desarthe, Albin Michel, 240 p., €21.90, digital €15 .

When the British government announced, in 2010, the creation of a marine protected area (MPA) around the Chagos, the initiative seemed commendable to many. Not to the former inhabitants of the archipelago, chased from their islands by the same British between 1967 and 1973. If the MPA is installed, fishing will be prohibited in the area, and they will not be able to return: how would they survive? The project seems to sweep away their hopes.

In reality, it will soon turn against the United Kingdom. Documents begin to circulate, showing that the British administration knowingly plays the defenders of the environment against those of the Chagossians. Mauritius, which had only been able to gain independence in 1968 by forcibly ceding the Chagos, turned to the International Criminal Court, which, in 2019, ruled in its favor. The Chagossians can return. Except that, since then, the British pretend not to have heard the lesson.

Committed book, since written so that things finally move, The Last Colony nevertheless applies above all to the multiplicity of angles from which Philippe Sands defines this file, which he reconstitutes, extends and interprets. Placing their history in the long time of the construction of international law, he makes the Chagossians, and first of all Liseby Elysé, who embodies them, the symbols of the fight for what is in his view the foundation of the legal order: a “Rule of law [qui] protects the weakest and most vulnerable from the excesses of the powerful”.

Florent Georgesco