Publisher's Synopsis
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.
