Philippe Sands KC is a leading public international lawyer who has moved beyond the realm of practitioner/academic by writing a series of books based on themes of international law and justice aimed at a wider audience.

38 Londres Street is the third in a loose trilogy, beginning with the award-winning East West Street and continuing with The Ratline. Connecting themes include the pursuit of Nazi war criminals and the struggle for international justice and accountability.

This time, Sands interweaves the stories of Augusto Pinochet and Walther Rauff. The former is (in)famous; the latter less well known.

Pinochet led a military coup which overthrew the government of Chile in 1973 and presided over systematic torture and killing of opponents until relinquishing power in 1990.

The book’s title is the address in Santiago once used by the Chilean Socialist Party, which was later transformed into a centre of torture and terror.

In 1998, during a trip to London for medical treatment and shopping, Pinochet was arrested on the application of a judge in Madrid for his extradition to Spain on charges of crimes against humanity, including torture, hostage taking and murder.

The most highly-publicised international law case before United Kingdom courts ensued, culminating in three hearings before the House of Lords. The key issue was whether Pinochet was protected by state immunity.

The Lords decided that he did not enjoy complete immunity. However, he was spared the prospect of ending his days in a Spanish prison not by the efforts of his lawyers but by doctors, being returned to Chile on health grounds in 2000 after 18 months or so of house arrest in the comfortable surroundings of the Wentworth estate.

Pinochet was not the first person to experience the restorative effects of a decision that he was not fit to stand trial. On landing at Santiago, he was wheeled onto an elevator and slowly lowered to the ground. The wheelchair was pushed onto the tarmac, whereupon Pinochet rose to his feet and strode forward unassisted, waving and smiling. This delighted his waiting supporters but embarrassed the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, who had approved his release.

Rauff was an SS Commander whose grim CV included persecution and killing of Jews and others in Tunisia and Italy and the development of “gas vans” – mobile gas chambers in which exhaust fumes were diverted into airtight chambers, poisoning or asphyxiating the occupants.

At the end of the war, Rauff escaped from an Allied internment camp and made his way to South America. Settling first in Ecuador, he encountered the then Major Pinochet who encouraged him to move to Chile. Rauff did so in 1958 and lived in Patagonia, relatively openly, until his death in 1984, working as manager of a company producing tinned seafood.

Efforts to extradite him to West Germany were frustrated by Chile’s statute of limitations. A Mossad plan to assassinate him failed in 1979 and, perhaps surprisingly, seems not to have been attempted again.

The book moves back and forth between the Pinochet case in the English courts – in which the author acted for Human Rights Watch – and Sands’ investigation of the extent of Rauff’s complicity with Pinochet’s crimes in Chile.

Aside from the description of the main arguments on immunity, there is much to interest lawyers in Sands’ account of the case, including his avoidance of the cab rank rule (having initially been approached to act for Pinochet) and the inside story of the circumstances surrounding the annulment of the initial House of Lords ruling due to Lord Hoffmann’s undeclared connections with Amnesty International.

Readers will also be interested, although not necessarily surprised, that Sands’ investigations suggest that the idea that Pinochet play the medical card to avoid extradition may have come from a high level within the United Kingdom government. Tony Blair’s memoir contains no reference to Pinochet or Chile.

Sands’ investigation of Rauff’s activities in Chile makes for compelling, if disturbing, reading. Although uncertainty remains about the details, it seems that he was involved with Pinochet’s feared secret police.

In a chilling echo of his wartime activities, it seems likely that Rauff played a role in the disposal of the bodies of tortured and murdered dissidents by the use of refrigerated vans intended for the transportation of fish products.

As in East West Street, a feature of the narrative is the discovery of connections between the events described and the author, some tragic, others more prosaic. Sands finds that relatives in eastern Europe were probably killed in Rauff’s gas vans and that his mother-in-law was distantly related to a United Nations official killed in Chile by Pinochet’s men. The stipendiary magistrate who signed the original warrant authorizing Pinochet’s arrest was Sands’ next-door-neighbour. And Sands’ father was Lord Hoffmann’s dentist.

Impunity is the central theme. Pinochet and Rauff evaded accountability for their crimes. Both were unrepentant.

According to his MI5 file, Rauff never showed any remorse for his actions, which he described as those of “a mere technical administrator.” In a statement released shortly before his death, Pinochet wrote: “I love my fatherland above all and … I take political responsibility for everything that was done which had no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration.”

Pinochet had supporters in this country, notably Margaret Thatcher, whose judgment seems to have been clouded by the assistance Pinochet gave Britain during the Falklands War. Norman Lamont called him an “honourable soldier”, an assessment which sits awkwardly with the findings of a United States investigation of “a sad, sordid tale of money laundering” in which Pinochet and associates had secretly moved many millions of dollars to accounts in the US. It turns out that he didn’t really need the £980,000 for legal costs which the UK Government paid him at the end of the proceedings in the English courts.

It is an article of faith to believers in international justice that, from the establishment of the Nuremberg principles, the direction of history has been towards greater accountability.

Although Pinochet was ultimately not held to account, the House of Lords’ decision seemed consistent with that view. Other developments in the 1990s included the establishment of International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate, prosecute, and try individuals accused of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity.

The optimism of the 1990s feels far removed from today. War crimes and crimes against humanity are daily news, but the principles of international justice established at Nuremberg and built upon through institutions such as the Yugoslav and Rwanda tribunals and the ICC are under increasing pressure.

Some governments – especially the United States – and parts of the media seem more concerned by the actions of those investigating, or protesting against, war crimes than by the crimes themselves. Whether this a temporary aberration or a longer-term regression remains to be seen.

In the meantime, I commend this book to all with an interest in international justice.

38 Londres Street: On Impunity, Pinochet in England and a Nazi in Patagonia by Philippe Sands. Published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 453 pp, £25.