She sued the Pope, defended Julian Assange and just won the Sydney Peace Prize. Is Jennifer Robinson our most fascinating lawyer? |
She sued the Pope, defended Julian Assange and just won the Sydney Peace Prize. Is Jennifer Robinson our most fascinating lawyer?
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Australian human rights lawyer Jennifer Robinson was awarded this year’s Sydney Peace Prize for her commitment to international law and her dedication to upholding and promoting free speech, press freedom, and gender and climate justice.
Fitz: Hello? I’d like to speak to the 1998 Dux of Bomaderry High, please?
JR: [Laughing.] I actually wasn’t the dux, I came second!
Fitz: What’s the dux doing now – running the United Nations?
JR: She’s my best mate from school days. We still surf together now, and she has a great career in international aid. She’s brilliant. But yes, when I went back to Bomo High the other day, I mentioned I wasn’t in the top rank while there and they liked that.
Fitz: Well, your career has a new peak to boast of, with the richly deserved award of the Sydney Peace Prize, recognising your extraordinary career with particular success in the field of human rights. When I write your biography, what will you steer me to as your absolute seminal moment, when you grasped that there is a thing called human rights, and that they are important?
JR: Well, it started early, Peter. Probably on my first trip to Indonesia as part of my language studies, while at Bomo. I was following what was happening in East Timor really closely, and there were mass human rights atrocities right on Australia’s doorstep, Indonesian war crimes – the fact that Australia did the right thing finally and intervened with the UN to stop those war crimes was inspiring.
Fitz: And your work in West Papua?
JR: Yes, at 21 I went to live in West Papua, which is unlawfully occupied by Indonesia, very similar in terms of history to East Timor. They also have the right to self-determination under international law and I was working with a local NGO on human rights violations by the military, including torture and crimes against humanity. I helped with the first investigation to gather the evidence, which became the first case in the Indonesian human rights court. Police officers actually were put on trial as a result of the work we did.
Fitz: Your first legal breakthrough?
The international lawyer who specialises in breaking the silence
JR: Yes, and then I was able to help the leader of the West Papua independence movement. He was in prison at the time. I helped him escape and got him asylum in the UK and asylum for his family. That’s when I really understood how compelling it was to use my legal skills for marginalised communities and how you can make a difference as a lawyer. I thought for a while I might become a diplomat for Australia. But after that experience I was set on becoming a human rights lawyer, and it all went from there, really.
Fitz: Your Rhodes scholarship was surely a huge leap forward. We can’t say it was your intellectual awakening because you were already well awake. But was Oxford a case being surrounded wall-to-wall by whipsmart people who then went back to their own home countries to crack that whip?
JR: It was extraordinary. There was a big class difference for me which was quite confronting, but the legal education I got was second to none. It was incredible, the way it sharpened my legal analysis and thinking. I was at Balliol, one of the top academic colleges, and we had this postgraduate........