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

Geoffrey Robertson is 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.

Contents 1 Biography 2 Legal career 3 Media career 4 Writing career 5 Bibliography 6 External links

Geoffrey Robertson was born in Australia and grew up in the Sydney suburb of Eastwood. He obtained his law degree from the Sydney University Law School before winning a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford.

Robertson married author Kathy Lette in 1990 and currently lives with her and their two children in London.

Robertson has worked for the European Court of Human Rights, the UN and various courts that examine human rights and constitutional law. He has served as a UN war crimes judge. He has worked on several cases on civil liberties throughout the Commonwealth and Europe. He also defended several people involved in private prosecutions brought by British morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse.

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.

Robertson has written several books. One of them, The Justice Game is on the school curriculum in New South Wales, Australia.

His latest book, The Tyrannicide Brief, details the story of John Cooke, who prosecuted King Charles I of England in the treason trial that sent him to the scaffold; at the Restoration Cooke was himself convicted of high treason and sent to the gallows.

In His 2006 revision of "Crimes Against Humanity", Robertson puts down a comprehensive account of human rights, crimes against humanity, war crimes. The book starts with the history of human rights and goes all the way to several case studies such as the case of General Pinochet of Chile, The Balkans wars, and the latest war in Iraq. Despite being a technical law book at some points, the book is a very interesting mixture of facts and Robertson's personal views. In most of them, his views are balanced and follow the "logical" human rights arguments and the spirit of the law, this can be seen in places like International Law, impunity, and war crimes. However, there can be found some controversial statements, at least for a human rights lawyer. When talking about nuclear weapons, Robertson states that the Hiroshima bomb was certainly justified, and then goes on to say that the second bomb on Nagasaki was most probably justified but might have been better if it was dropped outside a city. The argument he used is that the bombs, while killing more than 100,000 civilians are justified because they have pushed Imperor Hirohito of Japan to surrender which he wouldn't have done otherwise, thus saving the lives of hundreds of thousands of Allied forces, as well as Japanese soldiers and civilians. The argument Robertson uses is common among supporters of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and has many counter arguments such as the inherent immorality of using the atomic bomb on civilians regardless to the benefit of it. However, while Roberston is entiteled to his view, it might be too subjective for the context of this book.

• The Tyrannicide Brief, Chatto & Windus, 2005
• Crimes Against Humanity - The Struggle for Global Justice, Alan Lane, 1999; revised 2002 (Penguin paperback) and 2006
• The Justice Game, 1998 Chatto; Viking edition 1999
• Media Law (with Andrew Nicol QC), Fourth edition, November 2001, Sweet and Maxwell
• Freedom the Individual and the Law, Penguin, 1993 (7th ed)
• Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals - A New Collection, ABC, 1991
• Does Dracula Have Aids?, Angus and Robertson, 1987
• Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, Angus and Robertson, 1986
• People Against the Press, Quartet, 1983
• Obscenity, Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1979
• Reluctant Judas, Temple-Smith, 1976

• Official website