Geoffrey Ronald Robertson QC (born 30 September 1946, Sydney, New South Wales) is an Australian-born human rights lawyer, academic, author and broadcaster. He holds dual Australian and British citizenship.
Geoffrey Robertson is the founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers. He serves as a Master of the Bench at the Middle Temple, a recorder, and visiting professor at Queen Mary, University of London.
Geoffrey Robertson was born in Australia and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood, 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. In 2006 he was awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Sydney.
Robertson married author Kathy Lette in 1990 and currently lives with her and their two children in London. 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.
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), Randle & Pottle, the Brighton bombing and Matrix Churchill. 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.
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.
Robertson has appeared in civil liberties cases before the European Court of Human Rights and in other courts across the world. Until 2007 he sat as an appeal judge at the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone.
He is a patron of the Media Legal Defence Initiative.
Over a twenty year period, often with long intervals in between, Robertson has hosted an Australian television series of programmes called Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals. 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. In 2009 he spoke at the Ideas Festival in Brisbane, Australia.
Robertson has written several books. One of them, The Justice Game (1998) is on the school curriculum in New South Wales, Australia.
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. 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 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.
Geoffrey Robertson claims that Pope Benedict XVI was 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 the above policy up to November 2002. In Robertson’s opinion, the Vatican is not a state and the pope is not immune to legal action.
