Hit squads join queue as Geoffrey Robertson plays with fire

“I guess I have made quite a few enemies,” the Australian-born barrister concedes with a laugh.

Defending the IRA in the 1970s led to death threats, and when Robertson represented writer Salman Rushdie in the face of an Islamic fatwa, Scotland Yard was worried enough to teach the barrister how to detect a car bomb.

At the moment he is taking human-rights cases against the Kremlin and the governments of Ukraine and Azerbaijan, all of which can be brutal to their critics, and the police were called in to handle yet another death threat prompted by his 2010 book The Case of the Pope, which argued the Vatican should be punished for protecting pedophile priests.

The danger from furious Catholics, he concedes, is “small beer” compared with the reaction that might be provoked by his latest and 14th book, Mullahs Without Mercy, a clinical but savage indictment of the Iranian government’s human-rights record and its nuclear ambitions.

The Iranian government also has organised the assassinations of scores of political opponents around the world, and the more fanatical followers of the Ayatollah believe that the sort of criticisms the 66-year-old Queen’s Counsel makes in his new book justifies harsh retribution.

“Yes, the Iranian hit squads have been run directly from Tehran and they have bumped off 162 of their enemies,” Robertson agrees during an interview in his north London home.

“But my analysis is not entirely hostile to Iran because, at the end of the day, I say, as a lawyer, it would be unlawful for Israel and-or America to attack them.”

Up to a point, Your Honour.

Robertson, who founded the world’s largest human-rights legal practice in London’s Doughty Street, also argues in Mullahs Without Mercy that Iran’s human-rights crimes should disqualify it from possessing the bomb, and that an attack on its nuclear program eventually may be not just warranted but inevitable.

The acquisition and possession of nuclear weapons should be seen as a human-rights issue, he insists, criticising groups such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for not having focused previously on the atrocious threat posed by nukes to the basic right to life.

“If ever there was a human rights issue it is the appalling prospect of Iran with nuclear weapons. I don’t think it would be lawful to attack Iran at the moment, but I still think we have got to realise the nature of the beast of Islamic fundamentalism,” he says.

“If there is an agreement that the building of new nuclear weapons is a crime against humanity then, yes, intervene on the basis of stopping Iran from committing another crime against humanity by acquiring nuclear weapons.

“At the end of the day, the UN must have the power to bomb or invade a country that breaches the rule and develops bombs illegally.

“I am not a pacifist and I do think sometimes when greater dangers are involved the world has to act together. I am just concerned that until we put the rules in place it is premature for America and Israel to kill thousands of people in Iran next year.”

It is ridiculous, says Robertson, that international law bans the dum-dum bullet as immoral but does not ban the most destructive weapon of all time.

In 1996 the International Court of Justice rejected a bid to have all nuclear weapons declared illegal, but Robertson says international law has advanced since then and the case against nukes has been strengthened by continuing proliferation.

“I think the court got it wrong in 1996 and I think that if it were argued again today the court would take a different view. I would be very happy to take the brief to re-argue it,” he says.

He believes a first step could be a law banning the acquisition of nukes by non-nuclear powers, with other states empowered to attack if sanctions failed.

A massive problem is that logic and political reality mean any declaration that the possession of new nuclear weapons was a human-rights crime would eventually need to extend to the existing stockpiles of the Big Five – the US, Russia, China, France and Britain – plus the four more recent nuclear powers: India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea.

That would require the Big Five finally to deliver on their long-forgotten promises in international treaties to move towards wiping out their own stocks of nukes.

When I suggest to Robertson that is simply never going to happen, he is more optimistic, but for a deeply pessimistic reason.

“I think it will happen if there is a nuclear disaster, and I think there is likely to be in the next 10 years either a nuclear incident, accident or war.

“That will so concentrate people’s minds, hundreds of thousands of deaths, that it will force us to put the kind of thing I have suggested in place. We are out of the Cold War ‘mutually assured destruction’ era but we are entering this incredibly dangerous period which people don’t seem to realise.

“It is only a matter of time before Iran gets the bomb because an attack would delay it but not stop it. Saudi Arabia is at the moment negotiating with Pakistan to purchase some bombs, Jordan and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt have also said they want weapons, and plenty of others are queuing up.

“Without the coolness and the rationality of America and Russia during the Cold War there will be accidents.”

Robertson says “the first big example” of this new nuclear crisis will come next year, “when Israel bombs Iran, which could mean mass bloodshed and war”.

“Everyone thinks that bombing by Israel and-or America will be a surgical strike, like in 2007 when they bombed the Al-Kibar reactor in Syria and only five people were killed, or when they bombed an Iraqi reactor in 1981 and 10 people were killed.

“But with Iran they have got to bomb Natanz (a large underground site) and there are 5000 people there at any time. There are 371 tonnes of uranium hexafluoride in those sites and one bomb could release a cloud that blows over a city and you have got tens of thousands of casualties.

“There is a grave danger in the next few years, as nuclear weapons proliferate in states that are not very good at handling them – like Pakistan, Iran, South Korea – that there will be a nuclear accident,” he says.

“It will happen if Islamic fundamentalists in Pakistan get hold of a bomb, or if there is an accidental explosion or a war between India and Pakistan, or if North Korea has a Chernobyl with nuclear weapons or if it does fire off a weapon.

“When a nuclear disaster does happen, when there is a nuclear war between Saudi Arabia and Iran or something else, that is when this legal blueprint will become acceptable.”

International agreements ultimately would authorise intrusive inspections to ensure no country was building nuclear weapons.

“I think we will have that kind of world,” says Robertson, “whether it is in 2036 or 2056, but I think that it will probably take a nuclear incident, accident or war before states get a grip and allow that kind of incursion on their sovereignty.”

Mullahs Without Mercy is published by Vintage Australia. 

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