Prosecuting the Powerful: War Crimes and the Battle for Justice By: Steve Crawshaw

Author: Steve Crawshaw

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 Miloševic – 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.