What do the mainland right-of-abode claimants have in common with rap band NWA, boxer Mike Tyson, Rwandan genocide victims and a teenage hacker known as the 'Datastream Cowboy'? A legal team with Geoffrey Robertson QC at the helm. The Australian-born silk, who was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, specialises in human rights, free speech and discrimination. His career has been latterly based in England but he has appeared as leading counsel in courts as far flung as Mauritius and the Revolutionary Military Tribunal of Mozambique. Mr Robertson, 54, has managed to define himself as firmly anti-establishment - yet has reportedly holidayed in Tuscany with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. For rappers NWA, Mr Robertson claimed that one of their albums represented 'street journalism', not obscenity. For Tyson, he argued that a tirade directed by his client at fellow boxer Lennox Lewis - in which he threatened to eat Lewis' children - represented freedom of speech. Mr Robertson, whose books include The Justice Game, Crimes Against Humanity, and The Struggle for Global Justice, is married to humourist and author Kathy Lette. He also hosts a series of televised debates, Geoffrey Robertson's Hypotheticals, which dissect issues such as divorce, sexual abuse and medical technology. 'He's caused havoc to the establishment yet argues on his own behalf that he's a cap to be trusted,' wrote reviewer David Marr of Robertson's memoirs, The Justice Game, in the Australian Book Review. 'These are stories of gun running, government deceit, negligence in war and cruelty in peace . . .this is life beating fiction at its own game.'
