In Conversation: Geoffrey Robertson

This article is an excerpt from our interview with Geoffrey Robertson AO KC, featured in the exhibition Instruments of Surveillance and its accompanying publication.

"I’m a human rights lawyer, and being surveyed by spooks of different kinds and governments is a kind of occupational hazard. I’ve been surveyed, my privacy invaded by the Special Branch at MI5 in Britain. I’ve been followed and tracked by the Stalinists in Czechoslovakia when I worked with Vaclav Havel and other dissidents. I’ve been pictured by the CIA in the Ecuadorian Embassy when I went to visit Julian Assange. So as a lawyer for dissidents, for journalists, for those that the government of different kinds are oppressing, I have experienced surveillance.

In England, in the seventies, in the Cold War, it was simple to find out whether your telephone had been tapped. You didn’t pay your bill, and they never cut the phone off because, of course, the state’s appetite for information is even greater than its appetite for money.

I’m a human rights lawyer, and being surveyed by spooks of different kinds and governments is a kind of occupational hazard.

But in Czechoslovakia, those sad Stalinists who’d follow me everywhere when I came down from my hotel, they’d be there sitting with their heads under a paper, and I’d take them wherever I wanted. I’d lead them to museums, improve their education or take them to a wonderful Jewish cemetery in Prague, which has those leaning tombs and towers. I would lose them there and move on. But that surveillance could be kind of comical. I’m fortunate: as an independent lawyer, I owe nothing to anyone.

But other surveillance, for example, in the BBC, the MI5 kept tabs on journalists with left wing tendencies and destroyed careers. So others found themselves blacklisted if they had jobs.

Secret surveillance by cops of the world, no matter what their political allegiance is, can be very nasty; it’s an invasion of privacy and inevitably, sometimes, it’s misused...

Secret surveillance by cops of the world, no matter what their political allegiance is, can be very nasty; it’s an invasion of privacy and inevitably, sometimes, it’s misused. As an international judge, I’ve been protected by surveillance of terrorist movements, and so I’m not opposed to it in principle. I’m all for it when it comes to intercepting the wicked ways of terrorists, or child molesters, or even financial tax avoidance is something that could do with some surveillance. But it requires oversight, because there’s always a tendency, a temptation, for the spooks to go further. They’ve got no code of conduct. Every profession has a code of conduct. Lawyers have it. Doctors have it. Even real estate agents, for heaven’s sake, have codes of conduct. Spooks don’t. Their only ethic is that the end justifies the means, and that’s a dangerous ethic. So there has to be some kind of supervision.

Way back, we always asked the question: Who guards the guardians?

Way back, we always asked the question: Who guards the guardians? It’s a question that we have still not satisfactorily answered, because those who are given, by the state, special powers to invade the privacy of individuals and, in some cases, to destroy their careers, have to be supervised and quite strictly supervised. And it’s no good that all the guardians that we come up with are people from the security establishment. They’re indoctrinated into what is sometimes a bogus concept of national security, so we need, what I would call, patriotic sceptics."

Instruments of Surveillance, curated by Jemimah Widdicombe (NCM), is showing at NCM until March 2025. The publication, edited by Dr Tyne Sumner and designed by Dominic Forde, is out now available onsite at NCM.