Geoffrey Robertson's Blog
February 10, 2025
Donald Trump has declared war on international justice. Australia must speak up | Geoffrey Robertson
The ICC sanction is designed to intimidate and stop it from working against war criminals, Geoffrey Robertson writes
Donald Trump has declared war on international justice by the dictatorial device of an executive order. He has sanctioned the international criminal court. This empowers him to seize any funds belonging to the court or its judges or employees and to ban them from entering the US. He issued a similar sanction, during his previous presidency, but it was overturned by Joe Biden before court challenges to it could be heard. This time it will prevent ICC leaders from entering New York to report to the UN and will end cooperation to provide evidence to ICC prosecutors for action against Russian commanders. The greatest beneficiary of Trump’s sanction will be Vladimir Putin.
Australia is one of the 125 state members of the ICC but, inexplicably, it has not yet spoken out against Trump’s puerile initiative. Seventy-nine state members immediately did so, with allies including the UK, Germany and France describing their support for the court’s independence, impartiality and integrity as “unwavering”. They warned that Trump’s decision might imperil the confidentiality and safety of victims of the crimes being investigated.
Geoffrey Robertson AO KC is the author of Crimes Against Humanity, the Struggle for Global Justice, the next edition of which is published by Penguin this month
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July 10, 2024
Labour faces its first moral test in power. Will it protect Netanyahu from being prosecuted by the ICC? | Geoffrey Robertson
Britain finally has a chance to reject the Sunak government’s claim that Israel enjoys impunity in Gaza
Geoffrey Robertson KC is the founding head of Doughty Street ChambersShould Benjamin Netanyahu be prosecuted? The Sunak government tried to stop it happening, but now the Starmer administration must decide where it stands.
Back in May, the prosecutor of the international criminal court applied for an arrest warrant against Netanyahu for war crimes involving the indiscriminate bombing of civilians – more than 15,000 children have been killed so far – and the starvation of citizens in Gaza.
Continue reading...July 7, 2024
Keir Starmer was once my apprentice – and this is how I think he might fare as prime minister | Geoffrey Robertson
He is not offering great reform, but his Wilson-like workaholism and Attlee-like seriousness are probably what we need now
Geoffrey Robertson KC is head of Doughty Street ChambersWhat does Keir Starmer actually stand for? Will our new prime minister turn out to be a socialist (as Tories claim), an authoritarian (as the left fears) or a closet liberal? His legal background may hold some clues.
After university he applied to join my chambers, 1 Dr Johnson’s Buildings, which was at the forefront of the civil liberties battles of the day. In many ways it was not an obvious choice for an aspiring Labour MP, headed by the Welsh Liberal QC MP Emlyn Hooson, who had defended the Moors murderers, and had among its members John “Rumpole” Mortimer, the liberal Tory Joe Walker-Smith, and myself, by then a veteran of anti-censorship cases such as Mary Whitehouse’s crusade against Gay News, and author of the cumbersomely titled textbook, Freedom, the Individual and the Law.
Continue reading...June 30, 2021
Iran’s next president should face justice for his role in mass executions in the 1980s | Geoffrey Robertson
Ebrahim Raisi sat on a committee that approved the deaths of thousands of dissidents
Ebrahim Raisi, winner of Iran’s presidential election, bears responsibility for the deaths of thousands of prisoners in Iranian jails in late 1988. He served as a prosecution member of a three-man “death committee” – as prisoners later termed it – which ordered executions of male and female members of an opposition group, and then of males who were atheists, communists or otherwise leftwing “apostates”. Women in this category were tortured until they recanted, or else died after continual whippings.
Raisi, only 28 at the time, was Tehran’s deputy prosecutor and alternated on the committee with his chief. Last week, facing questions on the subject, he claimed: “All the actions I have taken have always been in defence of human rights against those who disrupted the rights of humans.” In a lecture in 2018, he is reported to have referred to the killings as “one of the proud achievements of the system”.
Related: Iran’s president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, is hardliner linked with mass executions
Geoffrey Robertson QC’s report of his inquiry, The Massacre of Political Prisoners in Iran, is published by the Abdorrahman Bouromond Foundation
Continue reading...April 26, 2020
Coronavirus has stopped trials by jury, and that's not necessarily a bad thing | Geoffrey Robertson
In some cases justice would be better served, and defendants would be better off, if they could choose trial by judge alone
Jury trials for serious crimes have come to a halt. Twelve good men and women and true cannot be permitted to sit cheek by jowl in jury boxes, or expectorate in each other’s presence in cramped jury rooms, while Covid-19 remains a threat – as it will for months or even years until the longed-for vaccine.
We believe sentimentally that trial by jury is a defendant’s fundamental right – but why not give them the additional right to choose instead a reasoned verdict from a judge, as they have, for example, in most Australian states? That would get courts back up and running, even if barristers and judges have to argue through their face masks, and it would be a boon to defendants with good cases who do not want justice delayed.
Related: UK courts told not to 'overreact' during coronavirus crisis
Continue reading...November 26, 2019
Ian Macdonald obituary
Ian Macdonald, who has died aged 80 from a heart attack, was the leader of the British bar in immigration law over the past half century. His forensic commitment to equality and race relations dated back to his successful defence of the Mangrove Nine in 1970, when an Old Bailey jury rejected an attempt to frame denizens of the Mangrove cafe in Notting Hill, west London, and he was still working on immigration and extradition cases at the time of his death.
Although some of his comrades took, in time, knighthoods and judgeships, Ian remained to the end a jobbing advocate – one with an intellectual influence on the subject, through his textbook on immigration law, greater than that of any judge or academic.
Continue reading...December 4, 2018
Keeping the Brexit legal advice secret is in no one’s best interests | Geoffrey Robertson
Attorney general Geoffrey Cox is in contempt of parliament. Like previous culprits, he should be locked in a cell underneath Big Ben
There is no political “convention” more misguided and less examined than the supposed rule that legal advice to ministers must remain confidential. This is the basis for the government’s refusal to publish the attorney general’s advice on Brexit, instead releasing a summary. The refusal relied on the theory of attorney-client privilege – namely that counsel’s advice to a client is confidential to that client who has the sole discretion over whether to publish it. Ministers, however, are no ordinary clients.
Ministers expend taxpayers’ money when instructing counsel to provide an opinion on the law – a law that everyone is entitled (and indeed presumed) to know. In so doing they act not for their personal interest but on behalf of the people whose interest they are bound to represent. In any true democracy, the public should be able to see that advice, to discuss and debate it, and since it is not infrequently proved, later in court, to have been wrong, to expose its errors before the government acts unlawfully or mistakenly.
Related: Brexit: senior minister could be suspended over legal advice
Related: Brexit legal advice and threat of contempt of parliament – explainer
Continue reading...October 23, 2018
Only an international court can bring Khashoggi’s killers to justice | Geoffrey Robertson
The slaying of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi was a barbaric act, ordered and carried out by barbarians. It cried out for justice – which means, inevitably, a trial. Yet all the British government is demanding is an “investigation” – by the same Saudi state that spent 17 days lying about its responsibility and is still offering unbelievable excuses for the murder. Any Saudi investigation would, at most, offer up a few scapegoats who would be subjected to a secretive procedure and in reality punished for their incompetence rather than their guilt.
But this was an international crime that took place in breach of United Nations conventions in the precincts of a consulate enjoying inviolability under international law. It involved the silencing of a US-based journalist for exercising the right of freedom of speech – a right also belonging to all his potential readers, and guaranteed under every international human rights convention. It was an action by a UN member state that threatens peace and security and it should be taken up by the UN security council, which has acted before to set up tribunals to deal with similar atrocities – the assassination of the Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, for example, and the Lockerbie bombing.
Related: Jamal Khashoggi: murder in the consulate
Continue reading...August 24, 2018
Put cameras in British courtrooms, and make justice truly transparent | Geoffrey Robertson
“Every court in the land is open to every subject of the King” declared the Earl of Halsbury in the famous case that enshrined the open justice principle in British law. Another law lord endorsed Jeremy Bentham’s conclusion that “Publicity is the very soul of justice – it keeps the judge, while trying, under trial.” That case was back in 1913, but its logic has never been applied to make public scrutiny of justice a reality, by permitting television coverage of trials. Now that the government’s victims’ commissioner, Helen Newlove, has declared that televising courts could improve the system, and ITV is about to show a documentary featuring footage of proceedings in the court of appeal, it is time to reconsider the ban on filming trials.
Court proceedings are sometimes highly significant public occasions, and understanding of them needs much more than a few breathless comments by a reporter pictured outside the court door, with frequently inaccurate “illustrations” – in reality, cartoons by “courtroom artists” banned from sketching inside the courtroom. Press reports are always incomplete and fail to capture the drama, or the oral emphasis and body language that can be crucial in a criminal trial.
Related: How Goldie is leading the tech revolution sweeping British courts
Continue reading...July 15, 2018
At last, a law that could have stopped Blair and Bush invading Iraq | Geoffrey Robertson
The Hague’s new crime of aggression might give belligerent heads of states a reason to pause
Tuesday is a red-letter day for international law: from then on, political and military leaders who order the invasion of foreign countries will be guilty of the crime of aggression, and may be punishable at the international criminal court in The Hague. Had this been an offence back in 2003, Tony Blair would have been bang to rights, together with senior numbers of his cabinet and some British military commanders. But if that were the case, of course, they would not have gone ahead; George W Bush would have been without his willing UK accomplices.
The judgment at Nuremberg declared that “to initiate a war of aggression … is the supreme international crime”. But this concept never entered UK law (as the misguided crowdfunded effort to prosecute Blair discovered last year). International acceptance of it stalled until states could agree on an up-to-date definition. The crime was included in the ICC jurisdiction back in 1998, but was suspended until its elements could be decided (in 2010) then ratified by at least 30 states (in 2016). At last it is finally being “activated”. In the meantime, Iraq and Ukraine have been invaded and other countries threatened, while Donald Trump attacked Syria last year. Now, the very existence of the crime of aggression offers some prospect of deterrence, and some degree of certainty in identifying the criminals.
Related: Tony Blair prosecution over Iraq war blocked by judges
Related: The ICC must hold the US accountable for crimes in Afghanistan | Katherine Gallagher
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