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Geoffrey Robertson Information

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

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.[5][1] In 2006 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Sydney.[6]

Robertson married author Kathy Lette in 1990 and currently lives with her and their two children in London.[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 Foxtel.[7] In his 2010 Who's Who entry, he lists his hobbies as tennis, opera and fishing.[1]

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.[citation needed] 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.[9][10][11]

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.[12]

Robertson has appeared in cases before the European Court of Human Rights and in other courts across the world.[13] Until 2007 he sat as an appeal judge at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone.[14][15][5]

He is a patron of the Media Legal Defence Initiative.[16]

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

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.[17] In 2009 he spoke at the Ideas Festival in Brisbane, Australia.[18]

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.[19]

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.[20] 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. 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.[21]

Bibliography

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. ^ Bowcott, Owen (31 January 1989), "Artistic merit defence 'should be open to foetus earring pair'", The Guardian (London)
  10. ^ Mills, Heather (31 January 1989), "'Foetuses as art' case hinges on common law", The Independent (London)
  11. ^ Wolmar, Christian (7 February 1989), "Nusiance charge in foetus case dismissed", The Independent (London)
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ 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.
  15. ^ 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.
  16. ^ "People". Media Legal Defence Initiative. http://www.mediadefence.org/people.html. Retrieved 2011-02-20.
  17. ^ "Marxism 2008, Key speakers". 2008. http://www.marxismfestival.org.uk/2008/keyspeakers.html. Retrieved 4 September 2010.
  18. ^ "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.
  19. ^ "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.
  20. ^ "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.
  21. ^ "Put the pope in the dock" by Geoffrey Robertson, The Guardian (2 April 2010)

External links

Persondata
Name Robertson, Geoffrey
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth 30 September 1946
Place of birth Sydney, Australia
Date of death
Place of death

Categories: 1946 births | Living people | People educated at Epping Boys High School | University of Sydney alumni | Australian Rhodes scholars | Australian expatriates in the United Kingdom | Academics of Queen Mary, University of London | English lawyers | English barristers | Members of the Middle Temple | Australian lawyers | Special Court for Sierra Leone judges | People from Sydney | Australian republicans | British republicans | Writers from New South Wales | Australian non-fiction writers | English legal writers

 

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