the Second World War, and had been involved in the murder of thousands of Jewish people during the Holocaust.
‘I’ve come across some really nefarious characters, but the thing that is very striking about them is that they’re very human,’ says Philippe. ‘Even people who do the worst of things are capable of love and grace and decency and generosity. And that’s very troubling. They’re people who do monstrous things, but they are also capable of love.’
The book is the third in a trilogy, following East West Street and the Ratline, that include the themes of crimes against humanity and genocide, justice, and the aftermath of the Holocaust and the Second World War. It has been a decade in the making, which is no surprise given its international reach, the depth of research involved, the many characters Philippe encounters and the layers of narrative that somehow all fit together.
As well as the story of Pinochet and Rauff, it weaves in courtroom drama, explainers of international law, a detective story and memoir – Philippe finds out he is related by marriage to Laura and plays a part in the events of 1998. Philippe says he doesn’t have a detailed plan when he starts writing a book, just a rough idea of what he wants to do. He was not sure there would be a connection between Rauff and Pinochet when he began 38 Londres Street, but as he writes in the prologue ‘it turned out the lives of the two men were deeply intertwined.’ He then keeps plugging away at the text, he says – ‘If you look on my computer, you’ll see draft 29, draft 47’ – until ‘somehow magically’ the finished story emerges.
When he is not writing, Philippe works as a barrister and teaches law at University College London. He describes himself as ‘a public international law person who started off on the environment and then segued into international criminal law and then human rights.’ As a young lawyer he worked for Friends of
the Earth and Greenpeace on environmental issues, and represented, among other things, the small island states of the Pacific – Samoa, the Solomon Islands and Marshall Islands – on nuclear weapons at the International Court of
Justice. His career was never part of a grand plan, he says, nor did he have a ‘burning desire’ to work in human rights. ‘The common theme to everything is working with those who are innocents, people who need assistance or need a leg up,’ he says. ‘It can be a very tiny country, it can be a tiny community, it can be one person. What I’m interested in is helping people who have rights.’
His Jewish mother escaped the Nazis in
Vienna in 1939 and though they did not talk about this while he was growing up, this family past, he says, must have played a part in the path his life has taken – ‘being the child of a refugee who came from a family in which dozens and dozens of people were murdered’. Certainly a big influence on him, he says, is his wife, the lawyer Natalia Schiffrin. ‘She is firmly on the human rights, social justice, progressive politics agenda. I think that I have imbibed a lot of that from her, so love propelled me in a particular direction.’
Natalia has given him firm advice at times. In 1998, when Pinochet was fighting extradition in London, the general’s team approached Philippe to represent him. When Philippe mentioned the approach to his wife, she told him: ‘If you do the Pinochet case, I’ll divorce you.’ Pinochet was never tried and was allowed to return to Chile from the UK on the grounds of ill health. But authoritarian leaders are still to be found the world over and, says Philippe, we should be ‘pretty worried’ about it. Citing how the persecution of Jewish people in Germany in the 1930s led to the Holocaust he says: ‘I think what history teaches us is that one thing inevitably leads to another, and once you open the door to doing things that you shouldn’t do and you get away with it, you think: “OK, well, I can go to the next stage and then the next stage.”’
He thinks things might get worse over the coming years – perhaps a major European war – but eventually we will turn a corner. ‘If you look at history in the round and the development of international rules, you know it’s always one step forward, one step sideways, one step backwards, then another step forward. ‘So in the longer run, I’m finally optimistic.’ n
38 Londres Street: On
impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia is published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
SPRING 2026 AMNESTY 29
‘Even people who do the worst things are capable of love and grace and decency’
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