Philippe Sands

speaker

170 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 13 Jun

Philippe Sands’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Gavin Francis & Philippe Sands: The Unfragile Mind · 13 Jun 2026 podcast

Let's take two or three questions together.

Okay, thank you.

Okay.

Amazing questions.

Yeah.

Well, we'll see how we get on.

You're obviously beloved by the medical profession.

Do you have anything to say about courts and lawyers?

I mean, I think courts may be part of the problem.

Having just spent, in the case that I mentioned, four weeks arguing on the question to prove genocide in international law in the absence of a written plan, you look at a pattern of conduct

And the courts have said you have to prove a special intention in the mind of a human being from which the only reasonable inference is the desire to destroy a community in whole or in part.

When I talk to my friends who are psychologists, my colleague at UCL, Professor Essie Widing, one of the country's leading experts on psychopathy, she just says it's absurd.

That's not how the human mind works.

You don't have a single overriding intention.

The human mind has, when it acts,

a multiple of intentions that are operating in parallel.

I'm giving this as an example.

And conflicting and taking you in different directions.

And the idea that the lawyers and the judges, because that's how we function, need to focus on one thing to be able to test out whether the criteria are met.

goes against exactly what you're talking about.

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