Geoffrey Robertson

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Geoffrey Robertson, Q.C., LL.B., B.C.L. (Oxon)

At the 2009 Ideas Festival, Brisbane
Born Geoffrey Ronald Robertson
30 September 1946 (1946-09-30) (age 65)
Sydney, Australia
Residence England
Occupation Lawyer
Employer Doughty Street Chambers
Title QC; Recorder
Spouse Kathy Lette
Children 2
Website
Geoffrey Robertson website

Geoffrey Ronald Robertson QC (born 30 September 1946,[1] Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian-born human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.

Robertson is the founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers.[2] He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London.[1][3]

Contents

[edit] Education and personal life

Robertson was born in Australia and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood,[4] attending Epping Boys' High School. He obtained his law degree from the Sydney Law School before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Civil Law.[1][5] In 2006 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Sydney.[6]

In 1990 Robertson married author Kathy Lette, and together they live in London with their children.[1] They had met in 1988 during the filming of a Hypothetical episode for ABC Television; Robertson was going out with Nigella Lawson at the time and Lette was married to Kim Williams, today CEO of News Limited.[7] In his 2010 Who's Who entry, he lists his hobbies as tennis, opera and fishing.[1]

[edit] Legal career

Robertson became a barrister in 1973. He became a QC in 1988. He became well known after acting as defence counsel in the celebrated English criminal trials of Oz, Gay News, the ABC Trial, The Romans in Britain (the prosecution brought by Mary Whitehouse),[8] Randle & Pottle, the Brighton bombing and Matrix Churchill.[9] He also defended the artist J. S. G. Boggs from a private prosecution brought by the Bank of England regarding his depictions of British currency.[9] In 1989, he was part of the defence team for Canadian artist Rick Gibson and art gallery director Peter Sylveire who were charged with outraging public decency for exhibiting earrings made from human foetuses.[10][11][12]

He has also acted in well known libel cases, including defending The Guardian against Neil Hamilton MP. Robertson was threatened by terrorists for representing Salman Rushdie.[13]

In 1972, he advised Peter Hain when Hain defended himself on several charges including conspiracy to trespass arising from his involvement in anti-apartheid protests, as a protest against the apartheid regime. During the ten-day trial at the Old Bailey Hain dismissed his defence team, which included Robertson, before being convicted and fined £200. He was also briefly employed to defend John Stonehouse after his unsuccessful attempt at faking his own death in 1974 before Stonehouse opted to defend himself and was convicted. His appeal was dismissed by the House of Lords despite his contention that the trial judge directed the jury to convict in a miscarriage of justice.[9]

Robertson has appeared in cases before the European Court of Human Rights and in other courts across the world.[14] Amongst these, Robertson was involved in the defence of Michael X in Trinidad and has appeared for the defence in a libel case against former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. He was also involved in the controversial inquest of Helen Smith and also in the Blom-Cooper Commission inquiry into the smuggling of guns from Israel through Antigua to Colombia.[9]

Robertson has also been on several human rights missions on behalf of Amnesty International, such as to Mozambique, Venda, Czechoslovakia, Malawi, Vietnam and South Africa.[9]

Until 2007 he sat as an appeal judge at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone.[5][15][16]

He is a patron of the Media Legal Defence Initiative.[17]

As of December 2010, Robertson is defending fellow Australian, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in extradition proceedings in the United Kingdom.[5]

[edit] Media career

Since 1981, often with long intervals in between, Robertson has hosted an Australian television series of programmes called Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals.[1] These shows invite notable people, often including former and current political leaders, to discuss contemporary issues by assuming imagined identities in hypothetical situations.

He also speaks at public events. In 2008 Robertson spoke at Marxism 2008, an annual festival hosted by the Socialist Worker's Party.[18] In 2009 he spoke at the Ideas Festival in Brisbane, Australia.[19]

[edit] Writing career

Robertson has written several books.[1] One of them, The Justice Game (1998) is on the school curriculum in New South Wales, Australia.[20]

His 2005 book The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold details the story of John Cooke, who prosecuted King Charles I of England in the treason trial that led to his execution.[21] After the Restoration, Cooke was convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered.

In his 2006 revision of Crimes Against Humanity, Robertson deals in detail with human rights, crimes against humanity and war crimes. The book starts with the history of human rights and has several case studies such as the case of General Augusto Pinochet of Chile, the Balkans Wars, and the 2003 Iraq War. His views on the United States' atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan can be considered controversial. He considers the Hiroshima bomb was certainly justified, and that the second bomb on Nagasaki was most probably justified but that it might have been better if it was dropped outside a city. His argument is that the bombs, while killing more than 100,000 civilians, were justified because they pushed Emperor Hirohito of Japan to surrender, thus saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of allied forces, as well as Japanese soldiers and civilians.

In his 2010 book, The Case of the Pope, Robertson claims that Pope Benedict XVI is guilty of protecting paedophiles because the church swore the victims to secrecy and moved perpetrators in Catholic sex abuse cases to other positions where they had access to children while knowing the perpetrators were likely to reoffend.[22] This, Robertson believes, constitutes the crime of assisting underage sex and when he was still Cardinal Ratzinger, the present pope approved this policy up to November 2002. In Robertson's opinion, the Vatican is not a sovereign state and the pope is not immune to prosecution.[23]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Reluctant Judas, Temple-Smith, 1976
  • Obscenity, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1979
  • People Against the Press, Quartet, 1983
  • Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, Angus & Robertson, 1986
  • Does Dracula Have Aids?, Angus & Robertson, 1987
  • Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals – A New Collection, ABC, 1991
  • Freedom the Individual and the Law, Penguin, 1993 (7th ed)
  • The Justice Game, 1998 Chatto; Viking edition 1999
  • Crimes Against Humanity – The Struggle for Global Justice, Alan Lane, 1999; revised 2002 (Penguin paperback) and 2006
  • The Tyrannicide Brief, Chatto & Windus, 2005
  • Media Law (with Andrew Nicol QC), Sweet & Maxwell, fifth edition, 2008
  • The Statute of Liberty, Vintage Books Australia, March 2009, ISBN 9781741666823
  • Was there an Armenian Genocide? (online), Doughty Street Chambers, October 2009, ISBN 9780956408600
  • The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse, Penguin, October 2010, ISBN 9780241953846

[edit] References

  1. ^ a b c d e f g Who's Who 2010. A&C Black. 1 December 2009. p. 1960. ISBN 9781408114148. http://books.google.com/books?id=bEt2PgAACAAJ. 
  2. ^ "Geoffrey Robertson QC". Doughty Street Chambers. May 2007. http://www.doughtystreet.co.uk/barristers/geoffrey_robertson_qc.cfm. Retrieved 29 March 2009. 
  3. ^ "Geoffrey Robertson, School of Law, Queen Mary, University of London". Queen Mary, University of London. http://www.law.qmul.ac.uk/people/academic/robertson.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  4. ^ "ENOUGH ROPE with Andrew Denton - episode 92: Geoffrey Robertson". ABC Australia. 2005-08-29. http://www.abc.net.au/tv/enoughrope/transcripts/s1448925.htm. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  5. ^ a b c Chu, Ben (11 December 2010). "Geoffrey Robertson QC: The Great Defender". The Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/profiles/geoffrey-robertson-qc-the-great-defender-2157455.html. Retrieved 28 January 2011. 
  6. ^ Eminent alumni, University of Sydney
  7. ^ "The Big Chill". Australian Story (transcript). ABC Television. 30 September 2002. http://www.abc.net.au/austory/transcripts/s685468.htm. Retrieved 29 March 2009. 
  8. ^ "The Times Law 100 2009 - Geoffrey Robertson". The Times. 23 July 2009. http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/law/article6714782.ece?token=null&offset=84&page=8. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  9. ^ a b c d e Robertson, Geoffrey (1999). The Justice Game. London: Vintage. ISBN 9780099581918. 
  10. ^ Bowcott, Owen (31 January 1989), "Artistic merit defence 'should be open to foetus earring pair'", The Guardian (London) 
  11. ^ Mills, Heather (31 January 1989), "'Foetuses as art' case hinges on common law", The Independent (London) 
  12. ^ Wolmar, Christian (7 February 1989), "Nusiance charge in foetus case dismissed", The Independent (London) 
  13. ^ Flood, Alison (12 August 2008). "Call for compensation after shelving of Islam novel". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/aug/12/islam. Retrieved 18 August 2008. 
  14. ^ Brett Bowden; Michael T. Davis (2008). Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism. Univ. of Queensland Press. pp. 17–. ISBN 9780702235993. http://books.google.com/books?id=dZjj87U6v9AC&pg=PR17. Retrieved 2 February 2011. 
  15. ^ Rory Carroll (2004-03-10). "War crimes QC under pressure to quit after bias claims". The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2004/mar/10/westafrica.sierraleone. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  16. ^ Davies, Hugh (2004-03-13). "UN judge defies claims of bias". The Daily Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sierraleone/1456752/UN-judge-defies-claims-of-bias.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  17. ^ "People". Media Legal Defence Initiative. http://www.mediadefence.org/people.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  18. ^ "Marxism 2008, Key speakers". 2008. http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/2008/keyspeakers.html. Retrieved 4 September 2010. 
  19. ^ "Brisbane Ideas Festival". BrisbaneTimes. 2009-03-20. http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/news/whatson/brisbane-ideas-festival/2009/03/20/1237526320317.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  20. ^ "Geoffrey Robertson's The justice game : study notes for Advanced English Module C / Bruce Pattinson". National Library of Australia. 2011-01-25. http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/8425207. Retrieved 2011-03-13. 
  21. ^ "Books & Literature: 'The Tyrannicide Brief: The Story of the Man Who Sent Charles I to the Scaffold'". Metroactive.com. 2006-04-10. http://www.metroactive.com/metro/10.04.06/tyrannicide-brief-0640.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20. 
  22. ^ Thom Dyke, "The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse". Solicitors Journal. 20 September 2010. http://www.solicitorsjournal.com/story.asp?storycode=16963. Retrieved 25 June 2011. 
  23. ^ "Put the pope in the dock" by Geoffrey Robertson, The Guardian (2 April 2010)

[edit] External links

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