Mandate is the candid autobiography of politician, human rights activist and writer Boris O. Dittrich. Boris Dittrich's entire working life is dominated by equal rights and gay emancipation. In the eighties he works as a lawyer helping homosexuals who have lost their partners to AIDS. After having worked as a judge for a while, he was a member of the House of Representatives for D66 from 1994 to 2006, the last three years of which as party leader. As an openly gay Member of Parliament, he focuses on the rights of LGBT people and the introduction of same-sex marriage. With success, because on April 1, 2001, the mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, performs the very first same-sex marriage in the world.

In Mandate Boris Dittrich looks back. He writes beautifully about his parents, about his father who fled from Czechoslovakia to the Netherlands in 1948, about his girlfriend whom he almost married, and about his coming out, which was far from ideal. Also outlines Mandate a special picture of the time: from Amsterdam in the eighties and nineties, when the AIDS epidemic hit hard, to the time of the purple cabinets and the turbulent political years that followed, when the murder of Pim Fortuyn changed Dutch politics for good. We follow Dittrich around the world for his work as an international lawyer and end up in The Hague, where he is once again politically active.

“There are people who change themselves and there are people who change the world. Boris Dittrich had to change the world because he couldn't change himself.' – The New Zurich Times