The Null Device

The Independent has a profile of Geoffrey Robertson QC, the eminent human-rights lawyer who recently wrote an indictment of the Pope for knowingly fostering child abuse and whose next project is likely to be defending Wikipedia editor Julian Assange from extradition to the US on espionage charges:

Robertson decided that his future lay in Britain. He was eventually called to the bar 1973 and embarked on a remarkable career. Cause célèbre followed cause célèbre. In 1978 he defended two journalists who had been accused of breaching the Official Secrets Act when they interviewed a former intelligence officer. The acquittal of the journalists was a landmark victory for press freedom. Robertson went on to defend Gay News and the National Theatre from the legal assaults of Mary Whitehouse. These trials – and their outcome – helped to deliver the coup de grâce to cultural censorship in Britain.

As a QC he prosecuted the Malawian dictator Hastings Banda and defended dissidents detained by Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore. He appeared in many Caribbean death sentence appeals at the Privy Council. And in 2002 came a move from defence to judgment, when Robertson served as a judge on the United Nations war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Robertson's private life has been as eventful as his public one. But his marriage to the wisecracking Australian novelist Kathy Lette has kept him close to the media spotlight, even when not in the court. The two met in Brisbane 20 years ago filming an episode of Robertson's long-running Australian current affairs television programme Hypotheticals. Both were in relationships at the time, Robertson with the future television chef Nigella Lawson, and Lette married to the Australian television executive Kim Williams. "Opposites attract" is Robertson's explanation of the unlikely union of the crusading liberal barrister and the author of such works as Foetal Attraction and Men – A User's Guide.

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