By MICHELE HEWITSON
There are circles where London-based human rights lawyer and Queens Counsel Geoffrey Robertson is possibly not given too warm a welcome.
You tend to get that when you take on adversaries as diverse as Mary Whitehouse, the Bank of England, international arms dealers and, almost, a Queen of Hearts.
The
Aussie expat - of whom it has been said, "He still retains a touch of the Australian larrikin" - has also had his moment of infamy in New Zealand.
He remembers it fondly. It was on that occasion, in 1987, that he set Sir Robert Muldoon and former Australian Governor-General Sir John Kerr adrift in a boat with only a cabin-boy for company.
Would a starving Muldoon succumb to cannibalism? And if he did, would he prefer the taste of the Australian rather than the cabin-boy? No. Most definitely not. And no, of course it didn't really happen - it was all hypothetical.
Hypotheticals is the name of the Robertson-devised television series in which a panel of experts make their way, guided and occasionally misguided by Robertson, through minefields of practical and ethical dilemmas. Robertson still presides, like some mischievous puppet master, over the show which screens in Australia and Britain.
Robertson is laughing immoderately - and mischievously - at the memory of his hypothetical foray to New Zealand. He's booming down the phone from the London home he shares with writer Kathy Lette and their two children, aged six and nine, who are bothering Dad while he's on the phone.
"They're too excited," Robertson says. "We're off to Trinidad tomorrow morning. I'm doing a royal commission into the independence of the judiciary down there."
He plans to deposit the kids and his wife on a beach while he sits under a palm tree and "decides questions on the administration of justice in the Caribbean." He gets about, does Robertson.
But the reason for his next visit here will be to fill the honoured guest's chair at a different sort of meal: a black-tie dinner at the Hyatt Regency as part of the Auckland Writers' Festival on May 21.
The reason for his invitation is that Robertson, in his spare moments, writes books. Those spare moments occur in between ducking off on human rights missions for Amnesty International, hiding Salman Rushdie and James Hewitt in his attic (not, it must be emphasised, at the same time), working for the prosecution against Pinochet, and acting as counsel in an inquiry into drug-financed gun-running in Antigua.
His two latest books, which he will pack on this trip instead of his lawyer's briefs, deal with the same subject, the law. But at first glance they have about as much in common as - for the sake of stretching an example - Rushdie's The Satanic Verses and Princess In Love, as told by Hewitt to Anna Pasternak.
Or, as Robertson puts it, The Justice Game "has more jokes."
Crimes Against Humanity: the struggle for Global Justice is a "global thesis about how we should prosecute. It looks at the impossible dream, after Nuremberg, of actually bringing international criminals to justice."
The Justice Game is a collection of cases Robertson has been involved in, including the one about the gym owner and the Queen of Hearts. The gym owner was New Zealander Bryce Taylor, who took secret pictures of Princess Diana as she worked out in front of a glass wall overlooking a public thoroughfare on what Robertson refers to, bemusedly, as "a contraption called a leg-press."
Princess Diana was determined to do something that had no direct precedent in British law: sue for damages for invasion of her privacy. Robertson, the author of a book which deplored the absence of any privacy law in Britain, took on Taylor's defence. (The case was settled, a condition Lette calls "courtus interruptus.")
This may have been ironic but it didn't amount to any conflict of ideology. After all, as Robertson says, "It is well known, barristers have adapted their morals from Hackney carriage-drivers, who found it advantageous to the continuance of their monopoly to take anyone anywhere."
Partly, Robertson says, he wrote The Justice Game - in which he is, said one reviewer, "in grave danger of giving the legal profession a good name" - as a way of standing back from the profession.
"I do occasionally think, what on earth am I doing? Am I really just a parasite? Have I given up my life to something that is not going to make a blind bit of difference to the progress of humankind?"
Despite the perception of the lawyer as the cab for hire, Robertson argues fiercely for the law as an instrument for positive change. Much of what society "thinks, feels, debates is in the courtroom." The courtroom, he says, operates as a sort of forum for the clash of cultural values.
The point is made, in Pythonesque fashion, in a series of verbatim transcripts from an obscenity trial of 1971 in which Robertson appeared in the Old Bailey for the editors of Oz Magazine. Half the six-week trial was devoted to the Rupert Bear strip in which said bear appeared with an erection.
Witness treasury counsel Brian Leary's cross-examination of two psychologists called for the defence: Leary: Mr de Bono, why is Rupert Bear equipped with a large organ?
De Bono: What size do you think would be natural?
Leary: What sort of age would you think Rupert is, to your mind?
Schofield: Oh, I'm very sorry, I'm not up to date with bears.
Leary (persisting): He's a young bear, isn't he? He goes to school. That's right, isn't it?
Schofield: I don't know whether he goes to school or not. I'm sorry but I'm obviously not as well informed as you are about little bears. I'm a psychologist.
Another courtroom, another cultural clash. Robertson acted for the Sex Pistols when a display of the cover of their new album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols was deemed to be an indecent exhibition.
A professor of English testified that in the King James edition of the Bible the word, which had been used in the Caxton version to mean testicles, had been replaced by the word stones.
After hearing this testimony, Johnny Rotten passed Robertson a note: "Don't worry. If we lose the case, we'll retitle the album Never Mind the Stones, Here's the Sex Pistols."
It is these yarns, related with barely contained incredulity at the processes of the law, which make The Justice Game such a rollicking read.
But Robertson's David and Goliath theme is not limited to gym owners, editors of satirical magazines and punk stars.
Robertson spent 20 years focusing on the death penalty. It was abolished in Britain in 1964 but remained part of its justice system in former colonies such as the Caribbean. In 1973 Robertson took on the case of Black Power radical Michael X and eventually managed to persuade the Privy Council of the incongruity of such a system.
Other incongruities remain. "It is one of the great ironies of our time," Robertson says, "that the nation [the United States] to which the world looks for a lead on human rights should be so obsessed with inflicting the death penalty."
America's stance on the death penalty does not, he asserts, act as a deterrent for violent crime. "On the contrary, I believe that it tends to increase it by socially sanctioning violent revenge."
And he is appalled by mandatory sentencing laws in Western Australia and the Northern Territories. "There is a place for politics and there is a place for lawyers," he says, "but there are areas where the two should not meet. The idea that legislatures can just send everyone to prison for the third or second crime, or whatever, is taking the power of justice away from the judges. It's just monstrous.
"I'm all for criticising judges, but I don't think their hands should be tied. That is not justice, that is the state. That's why you need a system which can fight against the state. The law should give David the slingshot - the opportunity of a victory over the state."
The opportunity of a victory on the home front is another story. Lette has "made rude remarks about various workaholic barristers in her latest book," Robertson says.
She has made rude remarks before. "Try being married to a human rights lawyer," she says. "You say, 'Come here and change this nappy.' And he says, 'I've got 350 people on death row in Trinidad'."
That must make Robertson the envy of chore-dodging husbands everywhere. "Oh, ha, ha," he says, "It works for a while and then she says, 'Let them hang'."
Lette has since had her revenge - of a sort. "As witty as a Kathy Lette novel," raved one reviewer about The Justice Game.
"Ye-ees ... well ... yes, ha, ha," Robertson says. "I read that. We have a kind of matrimonial game of improving each other's prose. So occasionally you'll find traces of her puns in my work and my comments in hers. It's a matrimonial fetish."
Sounds cosy, as though Robertson finds the matrimonial game as perennially challenging - and amusing - as the justice game.
* Geoffrey Robertson will be at the Auckland Writers' Festival, May 19 to 21.
By MICHELE HEWITSON
There are circles where London-based human rights lawyer and Queens Counsel Geoffrey Robertson is possibly not given too warm a welcome.
You tend to get that when you take on adversaries as diverse as Mary Whitehouse, the Bank of England, international arms dealers and, almost, a Queen of Hearts.
The
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