Australia Day honours: Geoffrey Robertson a champion for human rights

Esteemed human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC has been named an Officer of the Order of Australia.

Geoffrey Robertson QC.

Warm beaches, cold beer, Princess Diana and a “pimply” 1950s Sydney state school kid in a land where “far-fetched dreams come true”. So were the thoughts in the clockwork mind of esteemed human rights barrister Geoffrey Robertson QC yesterday upon word he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia.

“This honour comes as a happy reminder that although an ­expatriate, I am not regarded as an ex-patriot,” said the dual Australian and British citizen, 71, from Eastwood, Sydney.

“Sea change is in the Australian blood, and although I’ve spent a lot of time working overseas, you never forget the warm beaches and the cold beer of the mother country. The English never allow you to forget your antipodean ­origins. When I was about to cross-examine Princess Diana, the Times described me as ‘anti-establishment, republican and Australian’, in ascending order of horror.”

Mr Robertson was honoured for “distinguished service to the law and the legal profession as an international human rights lawyer and advocate for global civil ­liberties, and to legal education as academic and publisher”.

He has argued countless landmark human rights cases in British and Commonwealth courts and the European Court of Human Rights, not to mention those landmark privacy law cases concerning British royalty in the 1990s.

He served as first president of the UN’s Special Court for Sierra Leone and is one of the three “distinguished jurists” on the UN’s ­internal justice council.

He has argued hundreds of death sentence appeals, prosecuted the Malawi tyrant Hastings Banda, ­defended author Salman Rushdie, boxer Mike Tyson and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and acted for Human Rights Watch in proceedings against ­Augusto Pinochet.

The Australia Day honour comes at a reflective time for the legendary barrister known by many Australians for his illuminating Hypotheticals television specials in the 1980s. He will soon release an exhaustive autobiography, Rather His Own Man, canvassing his extraordinary life from Oz to the Old Bailey.

“Writing an autobiography is like spending a year on a psychiatrist’s couch and I really have no desire to be shrink-wrapped,” he said. “I’ve tried to make fun of myself as well as explain how the law can be used to protect against unfairness and oppression by the state. I’ve always tried to hold fast to my belief in human rights as standards that reflect the most ­important human quality, namely our counterfactual capacity to care for others. The hardest thing is not walking the road, but crossing it to help someone in distress.”

Threaded through his book is his enduring love for his home.

Role models for us all

VIEW GALLERY

“When I was a pimply schoolkid at a state school in the Sydney suburbs, I got hold of a banned book, The Trial of Lady Chatterley, and it inspired me to dream of one day becoming a barrister at the Old Bailey — a far-fetched dream but dreams can sometimes be made to come true,” he said.

“In those days, of course, we were protesting against White Australia and capital punishment and Vietnam and censorship, and there was a police bashing in store if you protested too loudly.’’