Prosecuting the Powerful

Getting a head of state in the dock was once unthinkable but as journalist and human rights advocate Steve Crawshaw uncovers in PROSECUTING THE POWERFUL - a blend of on-the-ground reportage and intellectual history - it is a real possibility. In recent years rogue dictators from Serbia''s Slobodan MiloAevic - whom Steve interviewed -- to Liberia''s Charles Taylor and Sudan''s Omar al-Bashir have all ended up behind bars. Could Putin be next? Starting with reporting on crimes Ukraine, Crawshaw delves into the heroic history of how in the early 20th-century Raphael Lemkin (a native of Lviv) coined the term "genocide", and the lesser-known story of how the PM of Trinidad & Tobago was instrumental in setting up the International Criminal Court. Along the way we see how a brave whistleblower in Syria smuggled out pictures of Assad''s torture prisons and how the US passed a law giving it the freedom to storm the Hague and rescue any of its soldiers put on trial there. PROSECUTING THE POWERFUL tells a hopeful story of the long march towards justice for victims of state warfare.

Auteur

Steve Crawshaw has written and worked on human rights and justice for more than thirty years. He was a journalist at Granada Television before joining the Independent at launch in 1986, where his roles included Russia and East Europe Editor during the east European revolutions and Balkan wars,then Germany bureau chief and chief foreign correspondent. In 2002, he joined Human Rights Watch as UK director and then UN advocacy director in New York. In 2010 he joined Amnesty International as international advocacy director and then Director of the Office of the Secretary General. In 2018 he became policy and advocacy director at Freedom from Torture. His previous books are Goodbye to the USSR (1992), Easier Fatherland: Germany and the Twenty-First Century(2004), Small Acts of Resistance (with John Jackson, foreword by Václav Havel, 2010) and Street Spirit: The Power of Protest and Mischief (foreword by Ai Weiwei, 2017). He studied Russian and German at the universities of Oxford and St Petersburg, and lived in Poland from 1978 to 1981.

Texte du rabat

Could we ever see Vladimir Putin in the dock for his crimes? What about a Western ally like Benjamin Netanyahu? Putting a country's leader on trial once seemed unimaginable.But as Steve Crawshaw describes in Prosecuting the Powerful - a blend of powerful eyewitness reporting and gripping history - the possibilities of justice have been transformed.

Crawshaw includes recent stories from the front lines of justice in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and at The Hague, as well as his earlier encounters with war criminals like Slobodan Miloevi . He tells the stories of those who have demanded protection for civilians and accountability for war criminals - from the Swiss businessman who is the reason why we have the Geneva Conventions today and the prosecutors at Nuremberg to the Syrian police photographer who helped put one of Bashar al-Assad's torturers behind bars. He also follows the extraordinary unfolding story of two of the world's most powerful and well-connected leaders currently under indictment at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

From Gaza to Bucha and beyond, survivors seek justice for the crimes committed against them. But for that to happen, governments must finally abandon their double standards and have the courage to support prosecutions of those who commit atrocities, whether opponents or allies.

For all the current darkness, this is a historic opportunity. The scales of justice can and must be balanced. Now is the moment.