She sued the Pope, defended Julian Assange and just won the Sydney Peace Prize. Is Jennifer Robinson our most fascinating lawyer?

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?

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 bar where we all hung out. And I’d be sitting at the bar talking to someone who’s doing a PhD or DPhil on astrophysics, and next to me would be someone doing economic policy or philosophy or classics or art history, and these are the smartest people from all over the world who have come together in this little town and it’s just the most intellectually rich experience. I did what’s called the BCL, which is a really famous law master’s degree, then an MPhil in public international law on holding corporations accountable for human rights violations internationally. I didn’t finish a PhD because I started working with my mentor, Geoffrey Robertson, on cases and I was working separately on Guantanamo Bay cases, which was so much more exciting than my academic work.

Fitz: So you dropped out of your PhD?

JR: Yes, and everyone said, “You can’t do that.” And I was like, “Of course I can. Bill Clinton never finished his Oxford degree, so I think I’ll be okay”. I already had two undergraduate degrees and two Oxford master’s degrees. How many degrees does one need?

Fitz: Surely one of your most interesting early cases was suing the Pope?

JR: Yes, Geoffrey Robertson called and said, “Jen, I know your family’s Catholic. How do you feel about going after the Catholic Church over systemic child sex abuse?” I said, “Absolutely no qualms. Let’s do it!” And so soon, I found myself in meetings with our clients – Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens – three of the world’s most famous atheists.

Fitz: Did you win the case?

JR: It’s interesting. Instructed by them, we wrote a legal opinion, which became Geoffrey’s book, The Case Of The Pope. We made the case that child sex abuse within the Catholic Church is a crime against humanity because of its widespread and systematic nature, and the Pope can and should be held personally, criminally responsible for facilitating it and failing to end the practice. When the church found out that priests were abusing children, they didn’t report them to the police. They would just move them to another parish where they would do it again. We made the case that the Pope should face criminal prosecution for it. We said, let’s send the Pope to prison.

Fitz: And?

JR: And we achieved the outcome we wanted because as soon as we published our opinion, the Vatican changed its policy. And to us, that was a massive win.

Fitz: Now it’s none of my damn business. And whatever you say will go no further ... But did your Catholicism survive the case?

JR: Well, I was brought up in a Catholic family but I was already disillusioned with the church for a range of reasons, but I say I’m still culturally Catholic, but no longer practising.

Fitz: All right, the most famous case for you was surely working for years to free Wikileaks founder Julian Assange from his British prison.

JR: It was a classic human rights case as it was about defending Julian Assange’s rights – his right to freedom of expression, his right to due process and his right to be free from arbitrary detention – but it was also about defending everyone’s right to receive information and protecting our ability to hold government to account.

Fitz: It was not just another legal case, you were living and breathing it.

JR: Well, as a lawyer, I am deeply dedicated to all of my clients, but with Julian, the magnitude of the injustice he suffered in that case was just outrageous and all-consuming because of the immense government power we were up against. The failure of the Australian government to support him was confronting and unacceptable. And I didn’t want to live in a world, Peter, where an award-winning Australian journalist was going to prison for the rest of his life, and I couldn’t understand why everybody else wasn’t equally upset about it. How can that be? How can we allow that to be? I couldn’t rest until it was done.

Fitz: When finally you got him free two years ago, what are the moments that stuck with you?

JR: I’ll never forget calling him from Canberra, after meeting with the prime minister [Anthony Albanese] to say we had his support to get the deal done with the Americans. Then the phone call to say we had actually signed the deal with the US, and that he was finally coming home, which was just a few days before we took off. He didn’t want to get his hopes up.

Fitz: Why not?

JR: Because everything was so up in the air. It wasn’t a done deal, there was back and forth with the US government for over a year, and any leak could’ve knocked it over. If we didn’t take off on that Monday, it wasn’t going to happen because the UK government was going into caretaker mode for the UK election, and we’d be kicked into the long grass, into a Trump presidency, and it just would not have happened. It really went down to the wire.

Fitz: But finally, you’ve got him out of Belmarsh Prison, and you’re on the plane at London’s Stansted airport, with Assange and US High Commissioner Stephen Smith. Buckle your seatbelts and it’s wheels up! You’re on your way!

JR: Sitting next to Julian as we took off was surreal. I’ll never forget him saying, “Look, there’s the horizon. I haven’t seen the horizon for 14 years” and watching him marvel at it – something so simple that we take for granted. I sat back in my seat and thought “oh wow” and the enormity of what had happened to him and what we had just achieved hit me really hard. I’d seen a lot of him over the previous decade and a half, in the Ecuadorean embassy and in prison, and I would always tell him stories of home in Australia because he was so homesick and I knew more than most how much he’d suffered. But that simple reflection of his really hit me.

Fitz: Did you give yourself a little punch in the shoulder and say, “Fine work, Jen”?

JR: Not yet. Because we still had to land in the US territory of the North Mariana Islands [for the formal plea deal hearing in court] and it wasn’t a given that the US judge would accept the plea deal that we had negotiated with the Department of Justice. So it wasn’t until we got through that court hearing, we took off on the plane with our US Ambassador Kevin Rudd and Smith, and a while later Smith told us, “We’ve just flown into Australian airspace,” when I was like, “We did it. We really did it!”

Fitz: Bravo. Can you tell us how he’s going?

JR: His health has improved, and turned around 180 degrees since being home in Australia. He was in a pretty bad way from a health perspective by the time we got him out. And his time in Australia has done him the world of good, as you can imagine. And I’m just so relieved that it’s over and so thrilled for him and his family that he now has time with his kids. But I don’t know how you ever get over what he was put through.

Fitz: And do you expect him to return to some form of public life, or just live happily ever after somewhere by the beach in Oz?

JR: Honestly, that’s a question for him.

Fitz: Well, can you tell him, I want to put that question to him?

JR: I will. I’ll introduce you guys one day, we must make that work out.

Fitz: Then there was your case with the Hollywood actress Amber Heard and her case opposing her former partner Johnny Depp.

JR: Yes, Amber reached out to me when Depp sued The Sun newspaper in London, and she needed legal advice on what to do about it. I helped her prepare the evidence, and worked with The Sun in their defence and we won that case. We proved that he was violent towards her.

Fitz: So you can say out loud, “Johnny Depp hit Amber Heard violently”, and there’s no legal repercussions.

JR: We proved in a UK court that he was violent towards her on 12 separate occasions. He was violent towards her, but he then sued her personally in a case in the US before a jury, and he won, so you’ll have to put that in there. He denies the allegations and she lost the case in the US, but it is a fact that we won that case in the UK and we proved in court before a judge, who gave a long, detailed, written judgment about [his violence].

Fitz: And that is what curled my hair. It is surely extraordinary to have a case where you had a slam-dunk win in the UK, only for much the same case to go south when in the US. What shocked me were details of how public opinion was turned around and the second case was held in an entirely different environment.

JR: But what is clear on the face of the evidence is that there was an online campaign run against her – what I can’t say is who was behind it. Fifty per cent of the online activity was inauthentic. A great podcast, Who Trolled Amber Heard? lays that out. It actually shows that a whole bunch of pro-Saudi government bots were posting pro-Johnny content. I have to be very careful about how I talk about that. But what is true on the face of it, and what has been proven by journalists, is that there was an online campaign run against her. But what’s also scary is the rest of it was authentic – and what that says about our society and how we treat women. So to me as a lawyer, to have proven something in court and then to see it turned on its head in the public domain [through] social media is quite frightening,

Fitz: Which leads us, fairly naturally, to your next project. I am looking forward to the premiere of your documentary, Silenced. What’s its essence?

JR: It’s a documentary based on my book, How Many More Women? with my co-author, Keina Yoshida, and it really shows the lived experience of survivors and journalists when they’re sued for defamation. We want to show the real-world effects of how defamation law is being weaponised to silence women from speaking about their experience of gender-based violence and journalists from being able to report on it. The thesis of our book and the film – which tells the stories of survivors and journalists from around the world about their experience of being sued – is we cannot grapple with violence against women if we can’t talk about it.

Fitz: All right, it won’t surprise you if I say that – as the husband of one of the journalists involved - listening to you talking like that, I’m getting a case of deja vu all over again. I look forward to the premiere.

JR: I can imagine. Please give her my love.

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