Human Rights Law

In the long history of warfare and cultural and ethnic violence, the 20th century was exceptional for producing institutions charged with seeking accountability or redress for violent offenses and human rights abuses across the globe, often forcing nations to confront the consequences of past atrocities. The Holocaust ended with trials at Nuremberg, apartheid in South Africa concluded with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and the Gacaca courts continue to strive for closure in the wake of the Rwandan genocide.

As one of our leading campaigners for justice, human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith has spent a lifetime getting to know his clients—from detainees in Guantánamo Bay to prisoners facing execution on Death Row—and finding out, in his own words, 'what makes them tick'. But for much of his life, closer to home, there was a man whose mind remained off limits: his own father. It was only years after Dick's death, when Clive inherited more than 3,000 of his letters, that he could finally take a breath and start to piece together the obsessive personality behind them.