Lawless World: The Whistle-Blowing Account of How Bush and Blair Are Taking the Law into TheirOwn Hands

Front Cover
Penguin, Sep 26, 2006 - Political Science - 416 pages
Sixty years ago, the United States and Great Britain spearheaded efforts to create a new world order based on international rules. Today these same two nations are leading the charge to abandon many of the global safeguards they once fought to establish. Crisp, impassioned, and hard-hitting, Lawless World is an exposé and an indictment of a catastrophic realignment of the laws that govern international affairs, the book that broke the stories on the "Downing Street memo" and the "White House meeting memo." It is also a vivid and human account of the reckless way America has reneged on its very founding documents-and a call for us to recognize the role we should be playing to reassert the rule of law, and with it a stable, secure world. BACKCOVER: "In this expert and judicious study, Philippe Sands portrays a frightening image of 'America unbound,' self-exempted from the delicate fabric of international law on which human survival rests."
-Noam Chomsky

"A penetrating and detailed account of the extent to which those who claim to be spreading global values have ridden roughshod over them."
-The Observer (London)

"Lawless World goes to the very heart of the nature of the international order and its future."
-The Guardian (London)
 

Contents

A Short and Recent History I
1
Pinochet in London
23
A New International Court
46
Throwing Precaution to the Wind
69
Good Trade Bad Trade Cheap Shrimp
95
A Safer World for Investors
117
The Legal Black Hole
143
Kicking Ass in Iraq
174
Window Dressing
240
This Wretched Legal Advice
257
Epilogue
282
Atlantic Charter 1941
289
Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948
295
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel Inhuman
305
The North American Free Trade Agreement 1994
318
Advice on the Legality of Military Action against Iraq
329

Terrorists and Torturers
205
Tough Guys and Lawyers
223
Legality of Armed Force House of Lords
345
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

About the author (2006)

Philippe Sands is an international lawyer, professor at University College London, and a practicing barrister. Sands has been involved in many of the recent high profile cases in the World Court and elsewhere, including representing the interests of the British detainees at Guantánamo and the efforts to extradite Augusto Pinochet to Spain. He has written for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, taught at NYU and Boston College, and appears regularly on CNN and the BBC.

Bibliographic information