Geoffrey Roland Robertson

Geoffrey Roland Robertson AO KC (b. 1946), barrister, academic and defender of human rights, grew up in Sydney, attending Epping Boys' High and then the University of Sydney. He graduated Bachelor of Arts in 1966 and Bachelor of Laws with first class honours in 1970, winning a Rhodes Scholarship which enabled him to graduate with a Bachelor of Civil Law from University College, Oxford, in 1972. Robertson became well known for his role as defence barrister in a number of high profile trials in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s. These included the trial of Oz magazine's editors Richard Neville, Jim Anderson and Felix Dennis on charges of 'conspiracy to corrupt public morals'; the case brought against Gay News for obscenity in 1974; the prosecution against the stage play The Romans in Britain instigated by morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse; and the trial of one suspect in the IRA's attack on the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in 1984. His television series Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals – wherein he orchestrated the 'cross examination' of a panel of experts on selected social issues and dilemmas – aired for the first time in 1985 and ran until 2014. In 1990 he founded Doughty Street Chambers, a legal practice specialising in human rights, civil liberties, immigration, employment and criminal justice cases worldwide. Robertson has subsequently argued landmark cases on matters relating to terrorism, national security, immigration, defamation and extradition in courts such as the European Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the UN War Crimes court, his clients including governments, media organisations and NGOs. As a UN appeal judge, Robertson has delivered judgments on issues such as the illegality of the recruitment of child soldiers. Among his numerous notable briefs are: arguing the landmark case of Pratt & Morgan v. Attorney General of Jamaica, in which the Privy Council ruled that the death sentence could not be carried out on men who had served several years on death row; the case of R v. Ahluwalia, which established that women charged with the killing of violent partners could plead diminished responsibility on the grounds of PTSD; and acting for Tasmanian First Nations people in the matter of the repatriation of stolen ancestral remains from the Natural History Museum, London. Robertson's many books on law and aspects of history include The Justice Game (1998), The Tyrannicide Brief (2005), The Case of the Pope: Vatican Accountability for Human Rights Abuse (2010), Who Owns History? Elgin’s Loot and the Case for Returning Plundered Treasure (2019), and Rather His Own Man: Reliable Memoirs (2018).

Purchased 2022
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