Philippe Joseph Sands (born 17 October 1960) is a British, French, and Mauritian writer and lawyer at 11 King's Bench Walk and Professor of Laws and Director of the Centre on International Courts and Tribunals at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. Working in international law, he has appeared as counsel and advocate before international courts and tribunals.
Sands served as Mauritius' chief legal adviser, counsel, and publicist from April 2010 to December 2024, and has been a vocal supporter of its claims of sovereignty over Chagos and its former inhabitants, and against UK sovereignty.
Sands was born in London on 17 October 1960 to Jewish parents; his mother (née Buchholz) was French.
He was educated at University College School in Hampstead, London, and read law at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, receiving a BA degree in 1982. After completing his postgraduate studies at Cambridge, Sands spent a year as a visiting scholar at Harvard Law School.
From 1984 to 1988, Sands was a Research Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge, and the Cambridge University Research Centre for International Law (now the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law).
He has held academic positions at King's College London (1988âÂÂ1993) and SOAS (1993âÂÂ2001). He was a Global Professor of Law at New York University Law School from 1993 to 2003, and has held visiting positions at Paris I (Sorbonne), University of Melbourne, the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Indiana University Bloomington, University of Toronto, Boston College Law School and Lviv University.
In 2019, he was appointed the Samuel and Judith Pisar Visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School.
Sands was the co-founder of the Centre for International Environmental Law (1989) and the Project on International Courts and Tribunals (1997).
Sands was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1985. In 2000, he was a founding member of Matrix Chambers and was appointed Queen's Counsel (QC) in 2003. Sands was elected a Bencher of Middle Temple in 2009. He joined 11 King's Bench Walk on 1 October 2022.
From 2010 to 2012, Sands served as a Commissioner on the UK Government Commission on a Bill of Human Rights. The commission's Report was published in December 2012.
Sands has expressed the view that a ruling by an international judicial body, such as the International Court of Justice, could help resolve the scientific dispute on climate change and be authoritative and legally dispositive.
In November 2020, a panel of international lawyers chaired by Sands and Florence Mumba started drafting a proposed law criminalising ecocide, the destruction of ecosystems. The law could be in force within five years, he told the Financial Times in July 2021.
In 2006, in a new edition of Lawless World, Sands revealed that the then UK Prime Minister Tony Blair had told President George W. Bush that he would support US plans to invade Iraq before he had sought legal advice about the invasion's legality. The book writes of a memorandum dated 31 January 2003 that described a two-hour meeting between Blair and Bush, during which Bush discussed the possibility of luring Saddam Hussein's forces to shoot down a Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, an act that would cause Iraq to be in breach of UN Security Council Resolutions.
In 2009, Jane Mayer reported in The New Yorker on Sands' reaction to news that Spanish jurist Baltazar Garzon had received motions requesting that six former Bush officials might be charged with war crimes.
Sands attended a reading of Torture Team at the Long Wharf Theatre in 2011, described as Sands' "account of the U.S. sanctioning of torture".
In December 2015, Sands and two colleagues at Matrix Chambers drafted a Legal Opinion on the legality of UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia for Amnesty International, Oxfam and Saferworld. The Opinion concluded that by authorising the transfer of weapons to Saudi Arabia, the UK government was acting in breach of its obligations under the Arms Trade Treaty, the EU Common Position on Arms Exports and the UK's Consolidated Criteria on Arms Exports.
In February 2024, Sands argued in favour of the State of Palestine at the International Court of Justice's case on Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories. He said that "Palestinian statehood is not dependent on the approval of Israel" and that international law of self-determination required other "UN Member States [to] bring Israel's occupation to an immediate end. No aid. No assistance. No complicity. No contribution to forcible actions. No money, no arms, no trade, no nothing." He also claimed that the State of Israel "has arrogated to itself the right to decide who owns Palestinian land, who may live on it, and how it must be used" and its support for 700,000 settlers living illegally in the occupied Palestinian territory as "demographic manipulation of the highest order". Sands refuted the US and the UK claims that an advisory opinion from the ICJ would negatively impact future negotiations.
Sands served as Mauritius's chief legal adviser, counsel, and publicist from April 2010 to December 2024, and has been "a longtime campaigner for the country to control" Chagos against the UK's claims. Michael Gove noted that Sands is open about his support for Mauritius, but less open about "when he planted a Mauritian flag on UK territory â the tweet celebrating the annexation has been deleted."
In his positions working for Mauritius, Sands played a central role in the 2019 International Court of Justice advisory proceedings initiated by Mauritius to challenge the legality of the United Kingdom's 1965 detachment of the Chagos Archipelago. Mauritius won the case.
According to Yuan Yi Zhu, Sandsâ legal strategy frames the "1965 detachment of the Chagos from the Colony of Mauritius â freely consented to by MauritiusâÂÂs prime minister in return for cash â as a dispute over the decolonisation of Mauritius." He notes that with this legal framing, "Chagossians have no right to be at the negotiating table and no independent legal standing. Their right to have a say over the future of the Chagos, insofar they have any, are as citizens of Mauritius."
Remarking on the question Sands drafted for Mauritius's case against the UK, Dr Elodie Tranchez stated "the ICJ looked at the situation of Chagos from a very specific perspective, through the lens of the question that was raised very cleverly to ensure that Mauritius would win the case".
Remarking on the treaty at University of Cambridge in 2024, Sands stated "It's a really fantastic thing about Britain that I think it's probably the only country in the world where when you've been to an international court against your own country, won and humiliated them completely, they still celebrate you and that is special."
Under the terms of a 2024 treaty Sands negotiated, Mauritius will lease Diego Garcia to the United Kingdom for "ã101m a year, plus development monies for Mauritius. The ã30bn from the deal will reportedly be used to pay off Mauritius's national debt, and remove all income tax for 81% of the population.
According to Yuan Yi Zhu, most Chagossians, who live in Crawley, U.K., view Sands negatively, "having been treated like third-class citizens in Mauritius, a country five days away by sail from their homeland and where they face widespread racial discrimination". Zhu wrote that following the treaty, "so many Chagossians have chosen to flee Mauritius and to come to the UK that Crawley Borough Council declared a housing emergency."
In a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Sub-Committee on the Overseas Territories on February 28, 2024, Sands admitted to helping draft a 2021 Mauritian law criminalizing "misrepresenting the sovereignty of Mauritius over any part of its territory", which would have made it illegal for him to support British sovereignty in his work for Mauritius, and which made it illegal for Chagossians, in and outside of Mauritius, to dissent against Mauritius's claims. Sands testified he did not think this was hypocritical given his leadership at the free expression organization, English PEN, and disagreed that anyone would be prosecuted for such views under the law.
Sands lives in a "charming, blue-plaqued Hampstead townhouse" in North London with his wife and three children.
In a 2016 interview for The Guardian, he asserted: "I want to be treated as Philippe Sands individual, not Philippe Sands Brit, Londoner or Jew." Sands has argued that statehood is "that most artificial and fake of constructs" and called for a "global passport" to break the "oppressive, absurd, monopoly power" of the nation-state.
Sands has stated that he is "a great friend" of UK prime minister, Keir Starmer.
Gordon Rayner wrote that they both "came to prominence as international human rights lawyers and struck up a friendship that has lasted for more than two decades." Rayner noted that in 2016, Starmer "tweeted that he was 'interviewing my friend Philippe Sands (...) at the launch of his book on origins of genocide and crimes against humanity.'"
During Starmer's Labour leadership campaign in 2020, Sands worked in a phone bank, Rayner states to "urge them to vote for his 'friend'".
Under questioning at the International Relations and Defence Committee in June 2025, Sands revealed to the public that he was given Mauritian citizenship in 2020. It was granted by special ministerial decree.
In 2021, Sands received Mauritus' highest civilian award, the Grand Commander of the Order of the Star and Key of the Indian Ocean, which means that he is styled âÂÂthe honourableâ in Mauritius.
Remarking on Sands work for Mauritius in the Chagos Archipeclago sovereignty dispute, Yuan Yi Zhu wrote that Sands has "maintained a flourishing writing career. His 2022 book on the Chagos affair, The Last Colony, was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and received rave reviews, consolidating his public image as a champion of the Chagossians' cause." However, Zhu criticized: "it takes a special degree of cynicism to exploit the plight of some of the least powerful and most destitute people in Britain to enrich a banana republic in its neo-colonialist project and to present oneself as the moral hero in the process."
Continuing, Zhu wrote that several Chagossians in Crawley shared with him that Sands "is less than keen to discuss the matter with them, much less meet Chagossians there face-to-face."
In a book review in The Guardian of Sands book on Chagos, The Last Colony, Tim Adams wrote that "Human rights lawyer Philippe Sands relates the wider tragedy of the scandal with nerve and precision."