Geoffrey Robertson - Legal Career

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), Randle & Pottle, the Brighton bombing and Matrix Churchill. 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. 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.

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.

Robertson has appeared in cases before the European Court of Human Rights and in other courts across the world. 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.

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.

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.

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