The End of Impunity?

Friday 3 November 2006
The End of Impunity?
In the week that Saddam Hussein is expected to be sentenced to death, Justice Geoffrey Robertson QC, a UN appeal judge and the author of Crimes against Humanity will discuss whether his trial has been fair and his sentence justifiable.

Justice Robertson will be speaking at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth on Wednesday 8 November when he will deliver the Lord Morris Memorial Lecture. He will discuss the difficulties of putting tyrants on trial, from Charles I to Slobodan Milosevic and will explain how international criminal law has developed since Nuremberg to make that at least a possibility.

The lecture takes place at 5 p.m. in lecture theatre A12 in the Hugh Owen building on the University's Penglais campus. Justice Robertson will also be signing copies of his books ‘The Tyrannicide Brief' and ‘Crimes against Humanity’, which will be for sale, before the lecture.
This is a public lecture – all are welcome.

Justice Geoffrey Robertson QC
Geoffrey Robertson is founder and head of Doughty Street Chambers. He was recently appointed to the Appeals Chamber of the UN Special Court for Sierra Leone.

He has argued many landmark cases in the European Court of Human Rights, the House of Lords, the Privy Council and Commonwealth courts. He has recently appeared in the Court of Final Appeal for Hong Kong, the Supreme Court of Malaysia, the Fiji Court of Appeal, the High Court of Australia and the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the World Bank's International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

He has appeared before Old Bailey juries in some of the most celebrated trials including Oz, Gay News, The ABC Trial, "the Romans in Britain", Randle & Pottle, the Brighton bombing, and Dessie Ellis, and at Appellate level in leading cases on abuse of process and identification and expert evidence. He led for the Defence in the Matrix Churchill trial and for The Guardian in the Hamilton / Greer libel action.

He has conducted a number of missions on behalf of Amnesty International to South Africa and Vietnam, and led the 1992 Bar Council/ Law Society Human Rights mission to Malawi. In 1990 he served as counsel to the Royal Commission investigating traffick in arms and mercenaries to the Columbian drugs cartels. He was made a Bencher of the Middle Temple in 1997.

He is the author of Crimes Against Humanity: The Struggle for Global Justice (2nd edition, 2002); Media Law (with Andrew Nicol QC, 4th edition, 2001); Freedom, the Individual and the Law (8th edition, 1993); and a memoir, The Justice Game (1999). His new book, The Tyrannicide Brief, was published by Random House in October 2005. It tells the dramatic story of how Cromwell's lawyers challenged the monarchy.

Geoffrey Robertson's other published works include Reluctant Judas (1976), Obscenity (1979), People Against the Press (1983), Does Dracula Have Aids? (1989) and Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals. His play, The Trials of Oz, won a BAFTA "Best Play" nomination for 1991, and he was the recipient of a 1993 Freedom of Information Award.

He is a Recorder, a Master of the Middle Temple, Council Member of Justice, Trustee of the Capital Cases Trust and a Visiting Professor in Human Rights Law at Birkbeck College and Queen Mary College, University of London.