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Steve Crawshaw talks to Helena Kennedy

Prosecuting the Powerful

Hay Festival 2025, 

Steve Crawshaw has written and worked on human rights and justice for more than thirty years, from reporting on Eastern Europe for The Independent to directing Human Rights Watch, becoming advocacy director for the UN and Amnesty International and then Director of the Office of the Secretary General. With human rights lawyer Baroness Helena Kennedy, he discusses the process of bringing war criminals to justice.

Putting a country’s leader on trial once seemed unimaginable. But as Crawshaw describes in his book Prosecuting the Powerful, the possibilities of justice have been transformed. He recounts his encounters with retributive justice from Slobodan Milošević and Bashar al-Assad to the front lines in Ukraine, Israel/Palestine and at The Hague.