What Justice Teaches Us About Human Nature | Rupert Elderkin

In this episode of Echoes Across Time, Tim Levy sits with Rupert Elderkin, a former senior trial attorney with the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. For nearly two decades, Rupert worked on the prosecution of some of the gravest crimes of the modern era — from war crimes cases at The Hague to the long aftermath of the Rwandan genocide.

But this conversation moves far beyond the courtroom.

Rupert reflects on the deeper human questions that emerge when you spend years confronting the worst humanity can do to itself. Raised in Cambridge by parents shaped by the Second World War, Rupert grew up surrounded by quiet stories of resilience, sacrifice, and moral responsibility — influences that would later shape his own path.

Tim and Rupert explore what it means to pursue justice across decades, what sustains people who do this work, and how survivors of unimaginable violence often reveal the greatest strength of human character.

Along the way, Rupert shares reflections on courage, humility, moral responsibility, and the tension between humanity’s darkest acts and its quiet capacity for compassion.

This conversation asks a profound question:
 When we look honestly at both the worst and the best of humanity — what does it teach us about who we are?

If this conversation stayed with you, follow Echoes Across Time wherever you listen to podcasts and join us as we continue exploring what truly lasts.

Connect with Rupert Elderkin:

Social media:

www.linkedin.com/in/rupert-elderkin

Listen to more episodes on Mission Matters:
https://missionmatters.com/author/tim-levy/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

What will you leave behind when the noise fades and the years pass? I'm Tim Levy, entrepreneur, creator, and founder of Twin, and this is Echoes Across Time. Each week I sit down with extraordinary thinkers, builders, and dreamers to explore the values, stories, and ideas that outlast us. Because legacy isn't built in stone or stored in banks. It's written in who we are and who we help others become. Today on Echoes Across Time, I'm joined by Rupert Eldekin, a former senior trial attorney with the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals, based in Arusha, Tanzania. For nearly 20 years, Rupert has worked on the prosecution of some of the gravest crimes of the modern era. From the war crimes cases at The Hague to the long aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. His work is painstaking and historical, restructuring decades-old evidence to show that time, distance, and hiding do not place anyone beyond the reach of justice. Before this path, Rupert stepped away from a city law career to attempt Everest and to retrace Raoul Damonson's journey to the South Pole using replica equipment, a reminder that his route here has been anything but conventional. He has seen some of the very worst humanity is capable of. What I'm interested to explore today is what sustains someone doing this work for so long and what it teaches us about justice, endurance, and human nature. So Rupert, welcome to my podcast. So nice to have you.

SPEAKER_01 1:56

Thanks, Tim. Good to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

So I want to explore firstly what sort of emotional environment you grew up, because I think this might be quite interesting in telling us something about where you've gone to. So do you want, yeah, start off by telling us a little bit about your childhood and and what that was like.

SPEAKER_01 2:16

From the time I could remember, I grew up in the outskirts of Cambridge. I had parents who had decided to marry only quite late in life. My father had been an army officer, and when I was born, he was, I think, 51, and my mother was in her 40s. So they were very much of their generation. My dad had joined the army in 1943. My mum had been a refugee. She lived in Malay and Singapore and had had to flee to Australia during the war. And they very much carried the attitudes and I think the values as well of that generation with that experience. But for me, I had a very stable, a very loving childhood growing up in Cambridge. I had one older brother, a year and a half older, so two energetic young boys, parents who certainly with hindsight, I regret to think that at the time I didn't really notice or appreciate it, but must have sacrificed a lot. They decided to pay school fees and put us through day school up to 13, and then we were both off at the same boarding school in the same boarding house. But we were definitely a house where we learnt the values from our parents that I think have stayed with me. And there's uh a very long trail leading from part of my mother's personal history that eventually ties up with the work I've done. Her dad had been interned during the war in Singapore and was eventually taken away and uh tortured and killed by Japanese military police. And that story never featured in our childhood, but with hindsight, it had a lot of explanatory power for, I think, some of the the subtext, the the unsaid things that perhaps governed uh how things were. There were a wonderful cast of characters around. I think because of their generation, you know, it was the the years, the 1980s and 1990s, where the world was still full of people who had done some pretty extraordinary things back during the Second World War and then carried on with normal life. And my parents seemed to know quite a few of these people. Uh I had no idea at the time, but over my teenage years and later, I would come home from boarding school or university and find clippings of obituary from newspapers that my mum would have then scribbled on saying, you know, do you remember that person who was our neighbour or or who you met then? And you'd read about somebody who'd been a submarine commander or a Battle of Britain pilot. And I think I understood that enormous contrast between people who do extraordinary things and at the same time are grounded, carry on living because that's that's what it is to be human. You can't operate forever in a world on the edge that they must have gone to. But I think it gave me a great respect for for humility and also an appreciation of just the fantastic lives that people could live.

SPEAKER_00 5:31

Yeah, so it's interesting, isn't it? You're almost living in a parallel universe. You have this very normal childhood, loving parents. But they themselves have been through a lot. A lot of what they've been through remains unsaid, but is spoken by the network of relationships that they have and the extraordinary people that they've associated with. I wonder how much of that was in your consciousness and when it started to appear. Do you remember a moment in time when it sort of became apparent that there was so much more to your parents' past than they were living in the present?

SPEAKER_01 6:14

It's a funny one, actually. At the really early childhood stages, my dad would come and tell us bedtime stories, and I I had a beloved soft toy, and he would always offer the choice: do you want me to make up a story about the soft toy, or tell you one of the stories about his army days, which had spanned the end of the Second World War through the Cold War, you know, the withdrawal of Britain from places around the world, and he'd seen much of it. My brother always asked for those stories, and I always went for the cuddly toy uh inventions. So I think I really steered clear of the things that we know. I wish now that I'd heard all of those stories and really knew some of those fine-grained details. But no, I think, I mean, I didn't even consider, for example, that I might one day become a lawyer, yet alone the kind of lawyer who's ended up prosecuting these kinds of atrocity crimes, certainly not through my school years. I didn't study law as an undergraduate. But I think during the end of adolescence and adulthood, I started to have conversations. My father told me a bit about the story of my mum's background, and he made clear that he was telling me things that it was better not to bring up because they were upsetting for her, and you know, quite understandably so. Her brother, who's still alive, my uncle, he knew an awful lot more. He'd had, I think, the desire and the interest to learn about his father's story. And there was even, you know, I later learned and acquired a copy of a book of the prosecution account of the trial of the people who had held him and uh tortured and killed him and others in Singapore during the war. So that's a sort of talismanic work for me. You know, whenever I've been in the office, I've been at work reading about meeting witnesses who have been through this kind of suffering, it's a touchstone of thinking, you know, this stuff happened before, I'm working on it having happened in the recent past, it will no doubt happen again, and it very much brings home whatever else is going on that there is meaning through all of this.

SPEAKER_00 8:26

Was there a time that you started to become more interested in the idea of justice? And if so, was there a catalyst for that?

SPEAKER_01 8:37

It's interesting because the concept of justice is embedded in a lot of, I think, theorizing and uh philosophy that I did study. That was part of my undergraduate degree, and it always seemed very inadequate that at the really higher-level philosophy and thinking through ethics, you know, what is the basis for a system of ethics and let alone systems of justice built upon it? And it appeared to me very much that you could try to look for a priori facts about the world that we could all accept these must be true, therefore people should behave justly and generally in a certain way. And it didn't seem to square with my observations about the world, about wars that are endlessly going on, about people who are the victims of injustice, and human organization does not seem to be very good at preventing these things from happening. So I think I was drawn towards thinking, okay, what can you do, practically speaking, in these cases, rather than wishing things were better and thinking about utopia, rather turning my back on the utopian philosophy that I had read into and found to be wanting, and just thought, okay, you know, here's something where maybe I can do do a practical contribution to a project that uh you know is it inherently worthwhile.

SPEAKER_00 9:59

Yeah. But you did start off by saying earlier that you thought there was probably something to do with knowing about your mother's background, that then, you know, once you got into this space, probably helped draw you in. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 10:18

Is that a fair way to Yeah, I think I'm a good ex example of somebody who certainly misled himself. You know, when I went through, as I say, my undergraduate studies, I wasn't studying law. I turned up, I suppose, in second or third year of university to the career service, and they thrust brochures about investment banks and consulting firms and all that sort of thing upon me. I even, you know, the only internship I ever did during those years was at an investment bank, and it became pretty clear to me over the course of a summer that the financial rewards were both enormous and structured in a way that there was never a rational moment to leave the career unless you burnt out or you got booted out. You know, the next year would always earn you so much more than what you put in before. That I I certainly didn't think I was a strong enough character to sit there, take the money, and then cut and run. So I turned my back on that. The law, generally speaking, seemed to be a worthwhile area to study. But I have to say, I I went into commercial law, I think, because it dovetailed somewhat with the studies I'd done before. I found it easier to get a job because I'd done some economics and ended up doing competition law, which is all to do with economics and um companies and business relations. And only after some years of doing that, where I realized that I was never going to be passionate about it, did I identify the opportunity to work in The Hague and again be fortunate enough to be hired into one of the positions with one of the prosecution teams there. So it was definitely when I got there, it fitted perfectly and it made total sense. And I've now stayed in for 20 years, but I didn't do myself any favours in exploring elsewhere, other than that the training of being in a law firm doing any kind of work under close scrutiny with clients who demanded high quality, probably served to get my foot in the door that I wanted to later.

SPEAKER_00 12:20

Do you know much about the history of your family before your parents? Uh, did you know your grandparents? And do you know much about where they came from and where their families came from?

SPEAKER_01 12:32

In little parts, yes, because my dad, one of his passions was genealogy, and he had this fantastic family tree, literally a paper document, and he was rightly proud, I think, uh, of having traced some part of the Elderkin, my family name on my father's side, the Elderkins, back to somewhere in the 17th century. There were apparently farmers in Huntingdonshire, so now north of Cambridge. The actual family story, I mean, I had some knowledge of, they were good old farming stock, and then somewhere in the 19th century, somebody decided to make perhaps it's an allegory for today's age, invested in something outside his area of knowledge and did rather badly. So the farm went, and then the Elderkins drifted off to find other work. My paternal grandfather was a Lloyd's bank manager, so a a British retail bank, and moved around the country. My father and his two brothers were born in the 1920s up on the Cumbrian coast, and then they moved to the northeast of England. I think it was 1939 when my paternal grandfather died. He had been in the Royal Flying Corps during the First World War, and I don't think that being in that conflict did him an awful lot of good. He all accounts was a heavy smoker and died of cancer just before World War II started. And then my paternal grandmother I never met, she died in the 1960s. But by again, my father and my uncle's accounts was a really wonderful woman. I think, again, a lot of my respect not only for the cast of characters that my parents surrounded themselves with when I was a child, but their own family ideals were formed by on my father's side a very strong mother who had three boys to raise. She got multiple sclerosis, ended up in a wheelchair, and carried on permanent parenting, you know, superbly through the rest of her life, and also fully supported my father when he went off to war, stayed in the army. You know, she could very much have called him back as the elder son to say you have duties back at home, but she encouraged him to follow his career and gave him really the freedom to do what he wanted, which I think my parents also replicated when I went off and decided to leave the home country. And then my mother's side, again, her father had been killed during the war, but I do remember that's the one grandparent I knew as a child, uh, my grandmother Dorothy. And she actually came to live very close to us in Cambridge, so I saw her pretty much every week until my mid-teens when she died. She's just an incredibly kind woman, very patient with I think squabbling boys. I would imagine at least 50% of the time when we visited her. My brother and I would probably try to beat the living daylights out of each other through through love, of course, not through any genuine dislike.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

But uh it's interesting listening to the story because you know your family is full of wonderful people who lived, in the main, fairly normal lives, and actually, for reasons that we will probe more into, you've gone into a world where you have had to confront or pursue people who have perhaps started off with very normal lives and then become, in some way, corrupted deeply. And I think it's interesting to understand as we go through this how you think that happens. What is it about the human condition that causes such profound evil and what that means, both in terms of the lens we apply to the past when we think about some of these horrendous points in time in history, and also how we think about the future and what it means as we think about what it is to be human? So it's a it's a really interesting area for me. As you grew up, do you think there was anything about yourself that you sort of learned and had to unlearn? Or, you know, particularly as you went into this field of work, was there something about you personally that you had to change?

SPEAKER_01 17:13

I think so. I mean, one of the visions I have of myself is that I have both not changed at all as to who I feel I am inside, uh as a mild digression. I had a wonderful neighbour when I went to London to study law after my undergraduate years, and I lived next door in a flat my parents owned, so my brother and I shared that. But there was a long-standing neighbour who I really got to know in my early 20s, Eileen Henderson, an old Scots lady, the only person I've met who had clear and fascinating memories of the First World War. She had been a little girl coming down from Scotland, visiting her father on leave from the trenches, and could talk for hours with her. But she told me well into her 90s, you know, I don't feel any different now than I did when I was about five years old. And I think that constancy of really knowing your character, you know, sort of how you react to things, that emotional level of identity hasn't changed. But I think I've progressed in pretty much every other aspect in terms of developing. I was rather shy as a child. I certainly didn't like public speaking, uh, wasn't one of the people who joined the debating club at school, or or frankly, even thought of being a lawyer because the idea of standing up in court would have absolutely terrified me. But I think that I was also both driven enough, partly through being a younger brother of a close older brother, and also because I think of the inspiration I saw in my parents and uh the lives of those around me to to value resilience and determination and to want to do better. So where I thought, well, I just need to try to change this, you know, improve on this, practice speaking, you know, put myself out there, um, that changed me over time, both in terms of actual, you know, the practical skills of standing up and speaking or trying something new, or even the expeditions I got into. I if you'd see me as a I think 12 or 13-year-old, I wouldn't have been the one volunteering to trudge across the Peak District on a rainy weekend, and then that big that sort of activity became a very big part of my life. So I think the evolution over time in myself really directed me towards you know wanting to find the best of myself and to do so with a determination that came from all that had uh informed who I was.

SPEAKER_00 19:42

Yeah, so uh it was interesting. I was going to ask you about the two expeditions that you did, Everest and retracing Amundsen's route in Antarctica, right? Those were the two.

SPEAKER_01 19:53

Yep, and I mean some climbing stuff beforehand. Everest wasn't the first time I'd stepped on a mountain, but it's by definition the biggest one I've come across. And uh interestingly, because I know there's the uh mutual friendship, but I met Dave Pierce on Everest on the expedition I went on, and then he was on the uh the expedition, the polar expedition as well. So really uh you know, somebody good to have nearby.

SPEAKER_00 20:20

Absolutely. So both of those things and and some of the other things you did clearly were taking you out of your comfort zone, and that was an intentional choice to try and stretch yourself, grow your horizons, change your perspective, I guess all of those things, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I had done a little bit of expeditioning in the sense that I had a gap here after school and before going to university, and part of that involved one of these rally international expeditions. So a very organized sort of expedition, but going down to Patagonia, really opening my eyes to what you could do and to having, I guess, that self-reliance aspect that is encouraging people who join the scouts or do outward bound, all those sorts of activities, taking you at a rate of progression through a camping trip for a night here, then going further afield, and then realizing you can do your own risk assessments, you can survive if it's cold and wet and horrible out there, if you've got a map and a route, and that built up to the mountaineering trips and onto Greenland. And I I miss it. I mean, the reason that has stopped, I suppose, is that you can't carve out months every year from a full time paid job. But as I see my children now growing up, I am targeting a a certain point in the future when I can look my wife in the eyes and say without a smile, it's it's time we took them somewhere for a bit of a challenge.

SPEAKER_00 21:55

I want to I've actually been dying to ask you about this. So does faith or spirituality play any part in your life? Has it ever? Has it been affected by um the experiences you've had?

SPEAKER_01 22:11

It has played a part, but not one where it's my faith that has sustained me. I don't have any strong faith. I did have, I suppose, a very typical schooling that was going through prep school and boarding school where Church of England Chapel was two or three times a week I would be in a church. So there were there's a lot of religion around. I would say very little evidence of genuine faith. Uh there were some obviously very deeply uh religious people who I encountered who were wonderful, and that there was one of the chaplains who came to our prep school services who was, I think, a Franciscan monk. Yeah, brown robes. I'm probably gonna mess up the the orders of uh uh the various uh monks, but Brother Martin, it was a lovely man, he came in from his uh usual church and would speak to us, and he spoke in a way that didn't seem to be proselytizing. It really focused on the stories of hope and humanity that to me I would focus on when I think of spirituality and belief. I'd rather believe in a world where people can be good and can redeem themselves rather than looking outside. And then there's I'd say the extra layer, which is that there is a truly horrible correlation between certainly religion, if not faith, in the cases of genocide that I've worked on. The years in The Hague, I was working on the Srebrenica genocide, where the victim group were Bosnian Muslims who were attacked by Bosnian Serbs, Orthodox Christians, and religion clearly was a fundamental element tied in with the history of the Ottoman Empire, and many, many layers of complexity, but religion was also fundamental to that crime. And then with Rwanda, which has been my most recent period of work, the involvement of priests, the use of churches which were taken as places of refuge for Tutsis fleeing to violence that were then turned into massacre sites, is something that I find very, very hard to reconcile with the idea that certainly there's a an overlay between professed organized religion and real faith. And yet again, against all of that, there are times when I've been doing this work, particularly when I've visited sites of execution, and one comes to mind in particular. So it's a building near Srebrenica called the Krabica Warehouse. It's a single-story barn 20-30 metres long, and it was a site where some 1,500 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were first crammed in as a temporary detention center after the Srebrenica attack, and then they were executed in that building. And even when I first visited there, more than a decade after the crimes, there was plenty of evidence of that uh execution day, uh blood spatter on the walls, pockmarks of rifle fire, rocket fire, everything. It felt the sort of place, I mean, it was it was gloomy, it was abandoned. You knew that mass killing had taken place there, and yet I I told myself there was a sense that I'm welcome here. The work I'm doing I know is for the memory, for justice for those people who are killed here. If somebody told me, you know, lie down here and you'll spend the night, then if there were such things as ghosts, I I really believe there would uh have been uh an understanding of friendship between them and me. And moments like that really it reminds me that whatever the traces are of people who have gone before, then if you're trying to live your life in the best way, in the right way, then you shouldn't worry too much about uh intrusions from another another dimension or another level of spirituality.

SPEAKER_00 26:18

Yeah, so you and I probably share the same views on both, you know, well, certainly on what I would call human-organized religions, that they are often just a cloak being used for the purposes of exerting power and control. But I'm interested when you look a little bit deeper and you think about faith. Do you think that the people who were committing these heinous crimes were people who did so because of their faith? Or do you think that religion was simply an excuse for what they were doing?

SPEAKER_01 26:59

I would say undoubtedly the latter. Although, again, given my encounters with many people, both on the survivor side and the perpetrator side, many people, particularly the perpetrators, are very bad about being able to even understand their own thinking or motivations or their willingness to reveal them. So I think it's an almost impossible probe to undertake to generally find if somebody's faith is of such a nature that it would support their commission of those crimes. There were certainly statements made. The predecessor of the tribunal I have worked for in Tanzania had prosecutions of Catholic priests who had encouraged the killing of victims in their own churches, saying, you know, God wants this, we will build a new church for him. There were believers in the congregations who were also going to commit the killings who were reluctant to attack people in a church, and they had their priest absolving them, saying, No, no, this is the right thing to do. Now, what those priests believe, I can't even start to imagine. You would hope that whatever training they'd had through their years in a seminary and whatever was seen in them as suitable to uh to allow them to attain the priesthood could not possibly be consistent with the expressions they made of that kind of hatred during the genocide. So I can't believe that it would be genuine faith. But again, the complexities of some of these people's psychology is such that you'll never know.

SPEAKER_00 28:31

Do we all have the capacity for such brutality?

SPEAKER_01 28:37

No, thankfully not.

SPEAKER_00 28:39

I remember reading, I think, Primo Levi, who was a Holocaust survivor and who wrote several wonderful books, and I think he wrote one called If This Is a Man. And it was sort of a, you know, post-um-Holocaust he survived, and it was about his trying to come to terms with how normal people had behaved so atrociously in the Holocaust. And, you know, it was it was the grappling with this idea that consumed him after he survived. And I guess you have to grapple with the same issues yourself, right? Yeah, indeed.

SPEAKER_01 29:21

I mean, it is something that you pick up not as the entire goal of the work you're doing sometimes. We're we're case building, we're investigating, and ultimately putting on a trial, putting on the evidence before a court that, if it's accepted, is intended to convict certain individuals of the crimes. But to achieve that goal, you look at a far wider body of evidence, you start to pick up little bits here and there that do inform a more general view of the perpetrator group. And genocide by definition, it's a crime that isn't committed in any case by only a handful of perpetrators. So there are plenty of examples embedded in the evidence that you see of who does what, how they behave, potentially what their motivations were, and a lot of it you see is the multiplication of violence, particularly in military structures, the idea that if the orders are coming from above, that you can suddenly find yourself able to deploy 50 automatic weapons to commit an execution rather than one. It's very much the idea that people will follow rules, even follow obviously illegal orders without having a strong belief in the crime they're committing, either because they're just very well trained as soldiers, unfortunately not sufficiently well trained in the laws of war, and also because of the sufficient disincentive to exclude themselves from that. And there was uh a well-known case of a young soldier in one of the Strebrenice units that was committing executions, who, at least on his own claims, said that he said he didn't want to fire at the prisoners, and his commander said that's absolutely no problem. Just lay down your weapon here and go over and stand with the prisoners instead. So it doesn't take a great deal more than that kind of threat to suddenly create the tools to commit a far bigger crime than any person could commit on their own. I suppose that's what you would take away from it as an observer of the wider body of evidence. Not everyone is so heavily invested in the atrocity itself. They're simply getting on as they think with their own best way to survive.

SPEAKER_00 31:34

I'm intrigued as to values and your values. And I suppose, you know, one question would be: which of your values have survived the test of real life, of your experiences?

SPEAKER_01 31:49

One that certainly hasn't survived was I think a very obedient, childish belief that there were just desserts, you know, that if you were clever and obedient at school that things would just go well for you, that people who did bad things would get their comeuppance, and it does not take very long working on these kinds of cases to understand the inherent unfairness and amorality, if not immorality, of the situation when innocent victims are able to be uh destroyed by people who decide that that's their goal in life. At the same time, I'd say that my sense that resilience, that trying, failing, getting up and trying again, never giving up, is something that has been reconfirmed both through my own efforts, my own desire to try to lead a life that was worthwhile and interesting, but also through my encounters, as I say, through through these cast of characters in childhood, but also through the astonishing people I've met on the survivor side, the the people who are in also members of armies who were committing crimes but decided to stand up against them, people who have shown that degree of courage and determination not to be destroyed by the acts of others. And I think that is a value that has been central, certainly, to the way I've chosen to live my life, but also central to my belief still in the ultimate good of humanity. When you see that people can be so strong when they have so little power in their own hands. Uh, that's been a wonderful confirmation.

SPEAKER_00 33:30

You have had the very difficult task of having to track down people who presumably have no issue, you know, using whatever to uh evade justice. As you go about doing that, do you feel that you need to be truthful, honest, or do you feel it sort of gloves off you'll do everything and anything you need to find these individuals?

SPEAKER_01 34:03

A pretty solid distinction in our work between tracking efforts, so locating the individuals, and building a case against them and gathering the evidence you need to use eventually in court if it's of sufficient quality and proves the points you need to make. The tracking work actually hasn't been my specialization. Um, it's certainly done within ethical boundaries, but it and doesn't need to follow the same pathway as does the work to put together a case where your questions to witnesses, your conduct will eventually come out in court in the disclosure of all that you've done to the people whose job is to defend the person who's accused of these crimes. So I've always had my career on the side of the evidence gathering and prosecution case, and for that, you know, unlike some excellent television programmes or films where prosecutors, driven by an ultimate sense of trying to do right, will do things that are very wrong to get there. I have never seen in my career that kind of misconduct. I think because of a very strong understanding, both that our job is to do the right thing, and also, frankly, if whatever one's internal beliefs are, um the system is designed to catch out such behaviour. The accused in these cases have excellent lawyers, they're entitled to be given all materials relevant to them, they have the right to appeal if things come to light after a trial has finished. So justice doesn't work where the clever prosecutor plants evidence and then gets a conviction that may be morally justified but wasn't there to start with. You work and do things right, but also the evidence is there. I mean, it's not as if we're trying to chase down people for very weak cases. It's not necessarily the most complicated kind of investigation. It is in terms of volume and finding the right people, but structurally, for example, our efforts for the Srebrenica genocide naturally focused on people who are in the Bosnian Serb army in positions of power because it was clear from very early on that it was that force whose soldiers had been used at the killing sites. And then the question of who's liable, you know, you have to build up through various kinds of evidence. But uh you certainly don't need and don't try to do that in any way that is going to be unethical or or against the law. How much time do you spend talking to victims? That's be I mean, throughout the years I've done the job, uh you will likely have spent a lot more time speaking with victims than with what we call insider witnesses. So people inside the perpetrator organizations and the time with victims, you know, one certainly doesn't try to limit it. You want to give anyone you meet who has experienced the sorts of things that victims have experienced all the time that they need to feel heard, to get from them the story that will help achieve a just outcome when it comes to trial.

SPEAKER_00 37:11

And when you think about the victims, are they the constituency that you believe you serve with the work that you do?

SPEAKER_01 37:21

Undoubtedly. They're primarily the people I would think about we perhaps pompously, but I think it's quite right, a bit like uh a prosecution in Britain will be in the name of the crown, and as such, as you know, the people of the country, as somebody working for a prosecutor of the United Nations, effectively our duty is performed on behalf of the citizens of the world. But in terms of those who are directly affected and who will have the most interest in the outcome of these trials, then absolutely it will be the victims and the wider communities who were harmed by the crimes committed.

SPEAKER_00 38:01

And so do you think it would be possible to do this work without having empathy for those victims?

SPEAKER_01 38:10

I don't think anyone would do it without that empathy. There's certainly an advantage in being able to, I suppose, turn on and off or control one's emotional reactions and sentiments at times when one's primary duty should be to do the best professional work possible, even in the face of information and and you know the visible effects of recounting what has happened that you get when you spend time and you meet with victims. Having that at the core, yes, I happen not to have, I think, a very visual mind so people can describe truly horrific things, and I don't immediately start creating the scene in my head and dwelling on it. And I think sort of people self-select, if you start this work and stay in it, is because you found a way to uh accommodate the sorts of things that may be too distressing for others to process.

SPEAKER_00 39:03

Yeah. I was going to ask you about that. Does that have an impact on you, you know, in isolation or in aggregate? You know, do you think about that? Do you dwell on that? Is that something that has a profound effect? The sort of visualization of what happened?

SPEAKER_01 39:20

I've always found it rather strange that the the most grotesque scenes, the stories that I know because I've had them described in detail, are so far removed from anything that I have ever experienced in my life, that they're closer, not in terms of my belief of what happened, but in terms of their impact to big horror films, things that I just don't even penetrate to a level where they make me have a difficult emotional response. The things that over the years are found get to me, those little asides where they're so close to what one can imagine. I remember during the years I worked on Srebrenica, they were where my parents were still alive, but elderly getting more frail, and I had huge uh compassion and concerns for you know, seeing them grow older and obviously head towards the ends of their lives, and then hearing the evidence of some of the people I met, particularly widows who'd lost their elderly husbands in Srebrenica, who would just tell little anecdotes about trying to there was one lady who had been trying to pass to her husband in a crowd of 30,000 refugees, uh, I think a sweater and some sandwiches, and she was pushed away by a soldier and didn't quite reach him. And that was the last time she saw him before many years later she knew he'd been killed. And if I let myself dwell on that, I I can easily reduce myself uh to uh to tears. But describing a mass grave, it's something that is it's absolutely awful, but doesn't take me to a place that uh you know it hits home in the same way. And Rwanda inherently there was one two fundamental differences between the Srebrenica genocide and Rwanda. Srebrenica is a genocide, the number of killed victims probably was around 8,000. Absolutely appalling crime. Rwanda, it's impossible to know because the counting couldn't and can't be done, but say 800,000 killed, but also active positive targeting of very young children and babies. There were boys who were killed who were victims of Strebronica, but that wasn't the norm in Rwanda, it was, and processing that, or rather, trying to control my need to process it is something that that has been far more difficult, particularly because in between the Strebronica work and the Rwanda work, that's when my wife and I started having our families. So by the time I started working on Rwanda, I had little kids running around the house and then would go to work and read about affording things being done to little kids.

SPEAKER_00 42:05

I want to ask you about ego and humility. And maybe we start off with some of the perpetrators that you've come across. Do you think ego played a big role in their behavior? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 42:18

To I say comical, and I mean in that only because it it was in the realm of ridiculous rather than scary and impressive, but uh behaviour that you really wondered how people can dissociate from the crime they've committed, or at least the evil they've committed, they might not consider it a crime, and still insist on their own view of manhood or dignity. There was one of the accused in the first trial that I worked on, a Bosnian-Serb army colonel called Vujudin Popovich, and Colonel Popovich, we brought evidence that he had been present at many of the execution sites, but one in particular we had some excellent evidence by another member of his own army who was willing to testify against this officer, and he had been at the execution site and men had been killed in front of him, and he said that he looked at Colonel Popovich during the execution or just after the bodies had been shot down, and he saw tears in his eyes. So this evidence came out in our pretrial interviews and came out in court. And then Colonel Popovich, during cross-examination, had his lawyer question this man, and the lawyer put put the proposition to him, Well, couldn't it have just been sweat? It was a hot day, wasn't it? Perhaps he wasn't crying, uh, it might have just been that he was sweating because it was so hot. And I was astonished, it was a moment that had actually humanised Colonel Popovich. It it certainly didn't absolve him of his responsibility for crimes, but if I were defending him, I think I would have. Been rather pleased to think against all this awful evidence, well, look, he's he's got a heart, he's got a soul, and then he wanted to be sure to tell his lawyer, no, no, I want them to see that I'm the kind of guy who might sweat on a hot day, but he's not going to shed a tear over a mass execution. And to me, that was I think peak of demonstration of ego in the courtroom. But certainly countless other examples, particularly in those military-related trials with the Bosnian Serb guys and culminating with General Mladic, who had an enormous ego, and again, his behavior in court could be quite astonishing.

SPEAKER_00 44:37

So if you think about who you are, you know, ego and humility are, you know, I would always see them as some sort of continuum. And you're talking about some individuals who've displayed some behavior which is at the extreme end of ego, you're presumably proud of the professional work that you do. How do you sort of reconcile the difference between the way these people behaved with the way you see yourself?

SPEAKER_01 45:10

That's an excellent question. I think because the fundamental motivation behind my continuing in the career was to do this work of justice to serve the interests of particularly those victims and the wider cause of humanity who can sustain itself and behave somewhat correctly towards each other. I have endless reminders. Should should my ego step in the way, then it's not going to be very long in terms of time or distance before I encounter somebody who is a living reminder that it just isn't about me. And that sits very well with me. I'm certainly, as you say, proud of the work I've done. I think more so proud of the teams I've worked with. I've had colleagues who are exceptional people, and it's the privilege of having worked for so long with people with such dedication who I would say have done far more to me and perhaps paid a far greater price in terms of their own mental well-being, certainly the sacrifice of family life in some cases, the time they've had for other things uh for themselves because the cause has been so great. And against that, then there's not much space to say that ego is uh going to have its day. But yeah, I mean I think it is healthy to feel that you're trying to do your best and you're doing your best turns into, well, I'm pretty good at this, I hope. And that adds to the service aspect, but it always circles back to doing this for some other interest than purely one's own.

SPEAKER_00 46:49

Yeah, and I'm certainly not suggesting any moral equivalence here, but I am mindful of the fact that, you know, if we take the Holocaust, there were probably German officers running, let's say, concentration camps who were being measured on how efficiently they were exterminating Jews. And by doing their job well and exterminating a lot of Jews, they were going to be rewarded or congratulated, or you know, would visit headquarters and be told what a great job they were doing. And certainly ego would have played a part in that. And I'm not for a moment trying to suggest that it was at all acceptable in any way. But I guess it it is interesting, isn't it, that at one level they probably would have turned round and said, well, I was just doing what I had to do as well as I could do it.

SPEAKER_01 47:50

Yeah, I think that's certainly part of the straw story. I think again, I I think I alluded to it earlier, but the idea that people can hold very hypocritical positions or opposite positions in their own heads to cover over the ridiculous divide that exists between perhaps their upbringing, they may well have been brought up in wonderful traditions, you know, parents like my own, people who gave them values and what have you, that I would recognise and support, that sort of people who, if they saw somebody being mugged in the street, would intervene because it was the right thing to do and still be willing to head into the forest with an execution squad and make sure that the job was well done. And I think people are both, as I say, complicated, but also not that complicated, certainly easy to manipulate. There's also, I think, a progression that I feel I could identify in the evidence from levels of brutality that you know the killers on the second or third day of a mass execution will be far more numb to it than the first moment they have to shoot. And the there seemed to be, I I noticed this as a passing fact, but reading witness statements from across cases in Bosnia, I was struck by the relative preponderance of people who, when they mentioned, you know, the civilian background of some of the perpetrators, there seemed to be an awful lot of people who'd worked as butchers. And it did occur to me that certainly, if you put a cow or a sheep in front of me now, I would be very squeamish about slitting its throat. Perhaps there's that degree of desensitization, first of all, to the simple physical side of bloodletting and causing death, that they were just slightly closer to being able to transpose doing that to an animal to saying, well, yeah, it's not so much different, is it? So, you know, I'm willing to pull this trigger or or stab this knife. Certainly not something that I think has ever been uh properly assessed statistically, but it did stand out to me. And again, I wonder whether that's part of the story that no, I don't think we can all turn into awful killers, but I don't think the pathway for many people needs to be that long, and certainly with those with the evil intent to motivate or encourage them to do so, then people can be susceptible.

SPEAKER_00 50:12

So you have seen, in many respects, the worst of humanity, but presumably also when you've talked to the victims, you've seen the best of humanity. What's your overall assessment?

SPEAKER_01 50:25

The good guys don't always win, but the good guys stand out a mile in terms of character, in terms of the strength that they have compared to those who are on the perpetrator side just in terms of I think everyone is an individual. There's not one uniform characteristic that will define all survivors or those who've stood against these sorts of uh atrocities. But I would say moral strength, inner strength, the determination to carry on living, um, that's something that to me has so much more weight behind it as the message of what you walk away from after these kinds of events. And I suppose that those the sort of message that one hopes can be teased out even in the face of the near annihilation of a particular part of humanity. That people who uh humble me. I I think, yeah, as I said, I'm not reduced to tears by the dreadful horror of the worst of the crime scenes. I am touched by things that brought me close to feelings of those in my own family and in my proximity. But I think also thinking about the courage in the face of near-overwhelming odds, that's something as well that I think emotionally resonates most strongly with me because they're such impressive people who, you know, I suppose one at least my habit is to look myself in the face and say, you know, how could I possibly be that person in those circumstances? And I think the straight answer to that is no one will ever know in advance, and frankly, you should never want to find out because the circumstances that would take you there are not ones that you'd wish on anyone.

SPEAKER_00 52:13

Where do you think moral strength comes from?

SPEAKER_01 52:16

Some people it is faith, absolutely. And other people it's clutching on to something, you know the thoughts of their family, the thoughts of the life they lived before. People dig it out, and I've never been, you know, I've done my expeditions, I've I've been to places where things haven't been very pleasant for short periods of time, but it's been entirely self-indulgent, self-imposed, and I I know where I've had to dig in for those moderate levels of challenge, and you're looking at yourself for something to say, well, look, I don't need to sustain myself forever, but what can get me through for the next half hour, the next hour, whatever it is you're doing? And my impression from some of the conversations with survivors is that it's that you you don't try to hope too far ahead, but you just stick with a place in your deep within yourself that is something that you value and you can still hope for.

SPEAKER_00 53:15

Has anyone that you have ever been pursuing or thought about pursuing tried to pay you off or corrupt you in any other way?

SPEAKER_01 53:26

Not to corrupt me, um the most rational pathway if you are under the scrutiny of prosecutors for these kinds of crimes, isn't to go after the prosecutors, it's to mess with the witnesses because it it's the evidence that makes the case. You can, as I believe happened in many cases in Italy during the worst of the mafia years, there were cases of intimidation of prosecutors, bombs blowing up prosecutors, very brave people working in extraordinarily difficult circumstances, but ultimately they're replaceable. I'm I'm replaceable. It would be, I think, a misguided effort to try to remove me from the equation. There's certainly many, many cases where accused persons or those close to them have sought to interfere with witnesses, both through intimidation, through physical violence, through killing, and also through incentives. And that's part and parcel of how people approach these kinds of situations if they believe they have the power and the ability to change an outcome that they don't want.

SPEAKER_00 54:38

Do you think that your work and maybe also your expeditions are part of a sort of wider search for meaning in your life?

SPEAKER_01 54:48

I think they're probably the culmination of the search rather than part of it. I think landing in the job that I have done had, you know, much of it is days in the office, looking at spreadsheets, looking through lists of evidence and looking for typos because you can't quite work out why you can't find the document you're looking for. But doing that, if I were an investment bank, the motivation behind it would be hugely different from the same motivation, thinking, yeah, this is on one step forwards towards justice for something that deserves to be stood up before justice. The expeditions, I think partly part the search for meaning, but also a sense, again, I think from the childhood influences and through the pleasure and through the awe that I've discovered from exploring the natural world, from having a sense not that I'm particularly special in my ability to climb mountains or to go to places that are somewhat remote, but more recognising in myself that many of these things don't require extraordinary ability, they just require a desire to step away from the easier path. And I think that chasing that sort of exposure to to nature, to wild spaces is something that in itself is fulfilling. It certainly is also self-perpetuating because I certainly haven't covered the uh four corners of the globe, and there are plenty of places I'd love to spend time uh time in, and then it factors into the equation of work, family, and and finance.

SPEAKER_00 56:23

You talked a little bit about when you were young and uh you know your father telling stories to you. Do you do that for your children?

SPEAKER_01 56:31

They have a very specific case when they ask me to tell them stories. They're quite little still. So my elderly boys 10, 9, and 7, and it's usually the seven-year-old who's the most insistent for the stories. He loves animals, and so they usually he allows himself, I think, three items I have to incorporate, which are almost invariably a dog, he quite likes big scary cats, and that awful 6-7 trend from last year. I meant to weave 6-7 into these stories, and I can tell you that there's not much scope there to teach them lessons of morality or courage. It's usually extraordinarily contrived things that they'll tell me are inconsistent and the same as the story from the night before. But you know, one does one's best with the materials one's given.

SPEAKER_00 57:19

Has having children changed you in any way, you think?

SPEAKER_01 57:24

Absolutely. In a wonderful way. And I find it hard to believe, other than in the most awful cases of parents who don't want to be parents and who abuse their children. They they bring so much to life. I think I've always had a childlike side to my view of the world. I've always had a desire to see things and appreciate whatever is around me and to want to explore, and being able to do that not just through myself, but through their learning, their growth in the world, and also frankly, being able to totally self-interestedly encourage them to do things that I like doing is a is a wonderful opportunity. It feels like getting to have a second childhood.

SPEAKER_00 58:07

And so when you think about what you'd like them to remember of you, just thinking about the way you know you discussed your father and mother earlier in our chat. How would they how would you like them to talk about you?

SPEAKER_01 58:23

I hope that I'm remembered with love for all the parenting mistakes that I've made, that they remember my love. It will be for them to to know their own feelings and people grow and evolve, but giving them the safety and security for the time that they're living with us as a family to make them confident to develop as themselves. And you know, there's something that I picked out from a diary I found when we we cleared out my dad's desk after he'd died, and it had a lovely, lovely quote in it that I actually had to look up. I I hadn't read enough poetry to recognise it, but it's something from Wordsworth, and it was a reference to the uh the best portion of a good man's life, those small, nameless acts of unremembered acts of kindness and of love. And I think it's the things that almost aren't remembered, but the overall state of support and love that you leave behind, rather than some magnificent demonstration that is uh, I hope what they feel, that they had a secure and solid childhood, and that it's something that perhaps they will replicate if they should have children of their own.

SPEAKER_00 59:37

If you think about the work that you've been doing, some may say that that is making the world a better place, or you're trying to make the world a better place. Is that something that you would talk to them about? Would you explain what you do to them, and would you want them to appreciate the value of it?

SPEAKER_01 59:57

It happens that my wife does exactly the same job as I do. I perhaps should have mentioned that earlier, but we we didn't meet in The Hague, and we weren't either of us working in the field at the time, but we have both ended up prosecuting war crimes, genocide cases, all these sorts of awful things. So it's pretty much unavoidable in the house, actually, for us to shield the children from the nature of the work, which doesn't mean describing the awfulness of the atrocities, but they have a pretty good understanding, I'd imagine, more so than most children of that age, of the fact that these sorts of crimes happen, that there are bad people in the world. I think they have a very basic sense of the good people and the bad people, and we're on the side of the good people, and it's utterly right and proper that the bad people should be locked up and punished for doing these terrible things. And I think that's about as deep into the complexity of it as they need to understand at this stage, or or we should go for their own well-being. I I wouldn't want them to worry it. I've never heard them talk about nightmares or ask the sort of questions that makes me concerned that we've perhaps told them too much. But I would certainly hate to reveal too much to them that would push that far.

SPEAKER_00 1:01:19

But as they get older and as they have the sort of mental capacity to process more about what you're doing, would you want them to think that you had been doing something important and worthy?

SPEAKER_01 1:01:33

I think I'd want them to know what I had been doing, and I would hope that they would be able to make the leap to deciding on its worthiness for themselves. Not so much coming back to trying to be actively humble or or to shrink one's ego, but I think it's very important for anyone when grappling with these sorts of questions to make their own judgment. I don't think in this instance that there's much complexity to it. I don't feel that I've ever worked on investigations or trials where there's some terrible grey area and we've been prosecuting people for political reasons, and there's another side to the story. I mean, of course, there's another side in terms of defending the accusations in the case, but fundamentally the atrocities did happen. That is unquestionable unless one is a seriously revisionist uh nationalist of Rwanda or nationalist of Rwanda, if one is still aligned with the genocidal ideology of Rwanda or a particular kind of nationalist in the former Yugoslavia, but otherwise the established fact is that the crimes happened, and I hope that there's no obvious contradiction to suggest that in trying to prosecute people who are suspected of them, then that's a fair and right thing to do. I wouldn't want to encourage them to follow the line of work, though. I think that uh again, that career path is, first of all, extraordinarily narrow, and it's also something that you have to choose for yourself.

SPEAKER_00 1:03:03

Now I'm conscious we've talked a lot about your professional career. And I guess this sometimes happens that, you know, because of your particular line of work, people are very fascinated by your professional career. But you're obviously quite distinct as an individual from the professional career you've had. So when you strip away the work you've done, who are you?

SPEAKER_01 1:03:34

If nothing else, work has taught me that I'm I'm just one person as others. Who am I in that sense of the character I always was, the five-year-old, I'm inquisitive. I I don't think I'll ever want to stop learning. I'm both in the active sense of trying to gain new ideas and understand how the world is changing around us, but also just in the the gloriousness of right now living in East Africa. I have time on my hands. I I go running every day on the hills and I'm just overjoyed when I can see a porcupine quill on the ground that I I go and stick in a very big pot of porcupine quills at home. But I still find the world and the places I I get to live in fascinating. I love the people I I get to encounter professionally, personally. I still do my best to speak very bad Swahili to people who smile and listen to me. I I want to take everything I can out of the life I've got, and I think that is that was there before I started this work, and it's certainly reinforced because of it. I also I do take pride in the sense that I I'm resilient. I want to be resilient, and I think it's something that isn't eminently learnable and trainable. I don't want to give up on things, and I will I will do my best, and I hope in general I've also tried to do my best to do the right thing, you know, even if it's hard, because that was the message that I learned from the people I saw around younger who I respected, and the people I've encountered throughout my adult life who I respected. So I don't think I make things easy for myself, but it's led to an absolutely amazing life so far.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:16

Would you say that you're an ambitious person?

SPEAKER_01 1:05:20

I'd certainly let admit that uh I let my ego and ambition sometimes get in the way of reality. I have the ability still, I maybe again it's a younger sibling thing, I am not over getting a pang of I don't know, jealousy if I read something about a billionaire or see a picture of somebody with a private jet and a yacht, and then it doesn't take me very many seconds to think, but hang on, I literally have actively chosen a course where that is not the goal that I'm seeking. And given how upset I'd be if I would get a scratch on a not very expensive car, then the idea of owning an extraordinarily expensive thing that you know the first time you scratch it with maybe half a million dollars worth of paint makes. Me realize that uh although easily swayed sometimes, it doesn't take me very long to course correct uh remembering what I value. I think as knowing your expeditionary experience as well, ultimately the things that I value most are just you can't buy them. You might need to pay sometimes to speed up how you get to do them, the different ways to travel to Everest or to go out on a long walk across a desert. But ultimately, what has meaning for me are things that you know I regard as challenges or experiences, and they're more valuable when I make them happen rather than uh you know find a way to purchase them. So the uh yeah, jealousy and ego, they're not absent at all, but um I I think I've got enough grounding to navigate them.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:45

Yeah, and I and I think actually that sort of answers my next question, which is if you had nothing, literally nothing, and you know, lived in a hut, could you be happy, could you be satisfied, could you be fulfilled?

SPEAKER_01 1:07:02

If my wife were in the room, she would laugh because I mean we don't live in a hut, but we we have a tin roof without insulation, and until a few months ago had an extraordinarily bad rat infestation. I think a hut would have been both more sanitary and uh yeah, less difficult to cleanse. Yeah, absolutely. I I remember I I mentioned I did one of those uh youth expeditions, Rally International, uh, in my teens, and there's a two-week stage when I and the group I was with were out camping in a rainforest down in Patagonia, and it was, as it says on the tin, rainy and wet, and we weren't very good at keeping the rain out, absolutely soaked and a little bit despondent. And then we trekked across and came across a farmer who let us sit under his tin roof barn for a night. And the joy of just having both a roof above our heads and something other than the ground to sit on has always stuck in my mind as thinking you really don't need very much. If you're tired and you can sit on something that rests your legs, that's great. Not having to pull layers of Gore-Tex and canvas around to stay dry is wonderful, and everything else is uh, you know, it depends how you want to take it.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:14

I usually end with a little quickfire uh round where you can just give me some very um sort of short answers. But on top of my usual questions, I want to ask you an extra one. What is courage?

SPEAKER_01 1:08:28

For me, it would be being afraid and doing it anyway. I don't think courage is the sense of action hero capacity simply to save the world because that's who you are. For me, the most courageous people I've seen have, as I say, you know, the survivors, the victims who have stood up when everything was pushing them down and and still tried to carry on.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:54

And you've seen you know atrocities on a on an enormous scale. Is it within everyone's capacity to have courage? Do you think it's part of human nature that everyone has it within them?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:10

Yeah, I would think so. I think not everyone will demonstrate it at the moment that they with hindsight might wish to. I think other aspects of physiology and psychology might cause people to exhibit other behaviours, but I believe everyone does have that capacity. I haven't seen that kind of those miraculous few days of newborn babies and just seeing how resilient and strong they are, I think that we're we're wired to survive. And I think that behind the idea of being afraid and still doing it is really, you know, deep down something that is an evolutionary advantage and also definitional for being human.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:50

What's one thing on your bucket list that you still plan to do?

SPEAKER_01 1:09:53

It's predicated on some prior steps, but I have been waiting for a long time to take delivery of a restored old Land Rover. It was it was meant to be delivered to me today, but I have it on the best authority I can hope for that it should show up tomorrow. And the plan for that, at least in the next six months or a year, would be to try to do a nice Southern African road trip. And then should we move on from Africa to put it in a container and hang on to it? But I love the idea of driving across some of these red dust roads with music blaring out of the speakers and uh and enjoying everything there is to enjoy here.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:31

Fantastic. I love that. Which book or movie has had a very profound effect on you?

SPEAKER_01 1:10:37

I've always been drawn to films that show difficult things through different perspectives, things that that change how you see a certain time or a certain place, and Empire of the Sun. So it's Stephen Spielberg directed it, but pretty old these days. But it's a young boy, a British boy, who lives a very privileged life in uh pre-second world war Shanghai and then ends up in a detention camp in Asia until the end of the war, and uh the essence of the movie is his his experience and how he sees uh the second world war going on around him. And I think because of some elements that maybe think it must uh reflect parts of my mother's experience, I I found it absolutely wonderful and it's uh it's just brilliantly produced.

SPEAKER_00 1:11:28

What everyday activity brings you a lot of joy?

SPEAKER_01 1:11:31

Seeing the boys in the morning, waking up, having my wife, the children sitting around, I mean I say sitting around, being somewhat proximate to each other. They they very rarely sit still uh as a group, but uh yeah, seeing them and just chatting about how things are. Do you have a personal hero or someone who's inspired you a lot? Endless. Inspired by so many people, and again, that has been one of the privileges of the work in present-day world affairs. Then certainly the Volodymyr Zelensky and uh say the sadly and terribly now deceased uh Alexei Navalny are two people whose courage astound me, and I think for reasons that are pretty self-evident.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:15

In one word, how would you describe this stage of your life? Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:21

Which I I'm to turn 50 in three months. I mean you asked me in three months and one day I'm I may well be Brother Morose, but no, if if it's okay and I don't fall off some kind of physical cliff, then I wouldn't have expected it to be as good as it's been and how it still is.

SPEAKER_00 1:12:39

That's great. Well, thank you so much, Rupert, that it's been fantastic having you on. Thank you for listening to Echoes Across Time. If this conversation made you pause, reflect, or see legacy in a new way, share it with someone you'd want to remember you by. You can follow the journey and join our community wherever you listen to your podcast. I'm Tim Levy, reminding you your story is already part of someone else's legacy.